It’s become standard in the US for polling places (real polling places, not the online kind) to hand out little “I voted” stickers after you’ve made your contribution. This is a totally meaningless act; the stickers aren’t used to actually track who has voted or not, they’re just there to make you feel good and allow you to display to everyone you meet that you’ve done your civic duty.

Unfortunately, when the bureaucracy gets their hands on this trivial little detail, they can’t leave it alone. It’s got to be made more elaborate; it’s got to become an ideological statement. So the state of Ohio is running an online poll to determine the design of these stupid little stickers. They have six designs to choose from, varying in quality from clunky to hideous, and two of them contain the bizarrely inappropriate message, “With god all things are possible”.

So far, the leader is choice #3, with 38.8% of the vote, and fortunately it does not contain the religious message. Instead, it says “I <map of Ohio> VOTING”, which doesn’t even make sense, but it says something that it is probably the simplest and cleanest and most comprehensible of the non-godly stickers.

In order to vote, you have to give them an Ohio zip code to prove you’re a resident, because there’s no way a goddamn foreigner could possibly know an Ohio zip code. It just adds another layer of stupid to the whole enterprise.

Hey, Ohio: how about a sticker that just says “I voted”? Why turn it into a fashion statement, or worse, a testimony to ideological purity?