The “I Voted” sticker has been a staple of modern US elections for decades, and its popularity has grown with the rise of social media. Many voters are eager to post on Instagram or TikTok photos of themselves with a sticker after getting it at the polls or peeling it off of a mail-in ballot packet. But the origin story of this now ubiquitous sticker is surprisingly murky. There is a brief reference to it in The Miami Herald in 1950, but the I Voted sticker’s popularity really took off in the 1980s.
“There were certain stores and businesses that would offer discounts to customers if they were wearing their I Voted sticker,” Rebecca Eissler, an assistant professor of political science at San Francisco State University, tells Teen Vogue.
Are you registered to vote? Check your voter registration here.
In 1982, the Herald reported that at least a dozen businesses in Fort Lauderdale were offering “discounts or special bargains” to patrons who showed up wearing the local I Voted sticker to help incentivize voter participation, even though doing so is technically illegal under federal elections law. In recent years companies such as Krispy Kreme have pivoted to giving out discounts and freebies to everyone on Election Day, not just customers donning an I Voted sticker.
The Phoenix Association of Realtors said it started designing and distributing these stickers in 1985, but the classic version of the I Voted sticker, with the billowing American flag, was reportedly designed in 1987 by Janet Boudreau, who ran the election-supply company, Intab. Since then the sticker has evolved further and taken on fun local flavor, with different states and cities having their own unique designs. For instance, Georgia’s I Voted sticker features a big orange peach.
And new designs pop up all the time. “States and localities are now often having competitions to design localized ones, and those are often targeted to either children or teenagers,” Claire Jerry, a curator of political history at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, tells Teen Vogue. According to Jerry, New Hampshire had its first competition, with fourth graders, last year, receiving more than one thousand submissions. One of the winning sticker designs shows the shape of the state as a person fishing.
Champaign County, Illinois, also had a sticker competition, in 2022, Jerry says, with high school students being among the youngest group of participants. She says the winning sticker design for the 9th-12th grade category, which was used as recently as the county’s 2024 primary elections, features three raised fists, two of which are wearing rainbow wristbands. A sticker designed by another young participant earned an honorable mention and features a monster with an eye in the middle of its face, along with the word “voted.”
A similar countywide contest was also held in 2022 in Ulster County, New York, and the winning sticker, designed by then 14-year-old Hudson Rowan, went viral. The design appears to be a neon spider-like creature with bloodshot eyes alongside the words “I Voted.” After the sticker went viral, Hudson described his design to Teen Vogue as “crazy and chaotic.” Says Eissler, even though the US voting age is 18, these types of design contests are a “fantastic idea” because they give the children and teenagers who participate a “personal connection to the act of voting.”
She adds, “Anything that can help younger people think about voting as something in their lives, even before they're able to vote themselves, is a good thing.”
Lisa Kathleen Graddy, who also works as a political history curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, tells Teen Vogue some historians have theorized that I Voted stickers function as a way to incentivize people to cast ballots. “It's a public way of proclaiming that you voted and encouraging-slash-shaming other people into voting as well,” Graddy explains, pointing out that this has always been the purpose of “Get Out the Vote” products and buttons.
Get Out the Vote buttons predate the I Voted sticker, with earnest and funny designs alike urging folks to cast their ballot. Some of the buttons have been tied to important historical moments, including the one example of a tangible I Voted badge Graddy says she's seen, which was created for the first election when women were allowed to vote, after the passage of the 19th Amendment. Because voting began as a public rather than private activity that evoked a sense of community, Graddy explains, the I Voted sticker is “helping to create that community sense again” by enabling voters to show their support and participation.
According to Eissler, the sticker has “really cemented” itself into the modern American voting experience, especially in the age of social media: “They've become even more entrenched and popular.” While Eissler doesn’t think these stickers are likely to be the deciding factor in whether a person decides to vote or not, she says, they have a “positive effect” on voters. “I think that little reward, that ability to feel proud, it probably helps people maintain the habit of voting,” she continues. “Once they've done it, they keep doing it in future elections because it feels good.”
The I Voted sticker has also taken on a new meaning for voters, Graddy notes; not only do people keep them as mementos, but the sticker itself represents something beyond the act of voting: “It's become a piece of iconography that symbolizes the fact that we can vote.”
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take
