I suppose that if voting methods can’t be uniformly implemented—electronic voting versus paper ballots, versus paper ballots in wacky shapes like butterflies—then voting stickers are just as susceptible to similar independence. Still, it’d be easier to take if my once-proud emblem wasn’t so clearly the runt of Tendo’s litter.  Heck, everyone else walked in with “I Voted” in three languages.

“Your sticker sucks,” said Chris, in a rare moment of subtle tact.

If there’s a lesson to be learned here about marketing, it’s that design does matter. My sad little oval with the rudimentary and hardly-to-scale corner image of a flag doesn’t even match up to San Francisco’s tri-language sticker, which employs only a tiny star as its lone design element. Head down the Peninsula to San Mateo County and you’ll find a full presidential seal, complete with “I Voted” in the requisite three languages, plus the signifier that it’s a presidential election. It’s also the only sticker to identify where it’s from.

Unless there’s a clearinghouse of generic voting stickers doing gangbuster business somewhere, the San Mateo offering couldn’t have cost much more to produce. And it goes a long way toward showing that effort and execution do matter in one’s final product. Perhaps this is a lesson to learn in campaigning, as well. —Jason Turbow, managing editor