Cumberland County school students can design the next ‘I Voted’ sticker. Power to the people.

I like a good voting sticker.

I like that they proudly proclaim: “I Voted.”

Here in Cumberland County elections and many elections across the country, the standard design of the stickers is the flag, Old Glory, centered in a circle that is typically blue or white.

I used to put my sticker somewhere on my dashboard after voting.

These days I put it on my shirt and wear it the rest of the day.

More: Pitts: What happened to Evans in Fayetteville mayor’s race? Why Colvin paced far ahead of field

Last Tuesday, I put the sticker right over Thor’s hammer on one of the many Marvel superhero T-shirts I own.

The hammer is fictional power. The ballot is real power — which is why folks spend billions in campaign ads to try to turn you this-a-way or that.

School students can design ‘I Voted’ sticker for 2024

Not a single soul who has read me will be surprised to find I am excited about the county Board of Elections’ contest for schoolchildren to design the next “I Voted” sticker. The winning design will be used by the board in the 2024 general election. Next year will be a presidential and Congressional election year, i.e., the Super Bowl when it comes to the task of running elections in our country.

The sticker contest is open to children in grades 6-12, “public, private and charter schools as well as home-schooled students,” according to information on the Cumberland County website. The deadline for entries is Dec. 15.

Students who want to participate must have the consent of a parent or guardian and, the release adds: “Sticker designs must be a 4-inch circle format capable of being reduced to a 2-inch format. The design must incorporate Cumberland County symbols, landmarks and voting themes. Submissions must be in JPEG, PNG or PDF formats.”

All approved sticker designs will be displayed at the Board of Elections website for 30 days, and the public can vote on which 10 will make it to round two, the release said. Three stickers will go to the final round, where the election board members will vote for the winner.

On Friday, Angie Amaro, the Cumberland County elections director, told me that she and her team decided to do the contest after seeing them tried out in other places.

“Other counties are doing it, and they're having a great turnout,” she said. She said the goal was “trying to get children involved or students involved and hopefully by the time they reach high school age they will want to work elections.”

I chuckled over the phone with Amaro because that sounds pretty ambitious.

But you gotta have a dream, and I figure these are the kinds of dreams elections people have.

The contest opened at the start of October but interest has been slow to grow. Amaro believes things will pick up as word spreads in Cumberland County Schools.

Lindsay Whitley, a school system spokesperson, said information about the “I Voted” sticker campaign has been shared with the Arts Education director and school principals, “instructing them to disseminate it among their staff and students, and to encourage participation.”

If you know some kid somewhere with some skills — and we all do — let them know.

Elections director: Smooth rollout for Voter ID

Last Tuesday’s primary for Fayetteville City Council was the first where voters had to have an ID for their vote to count, under a law that went into effect this year.

More: ID is now required to cast a ballot in NC. Here’s what voters need to ensure they can vote

It was a low turnout election, with 8.4% of registered voters casting ballots. The mayor’s race was the only one on the ballot everyone got to vote for; most ballots, like my own, featured just that race. Council districts 2 and 5 also had primaries.

Amaro said the new voter requirement did not cause any problems. She said before the election, many people came to the office on Fountainhead Lane to get a free ID card.

“We were making 13 to 14 a day for like, almost two weeks,”  the elections director said.

Under the law, people who do not have ID at the time of voting, can vote provisionally and bring identification later.

“The people that didn't have it Election Day I have contacted them to come in and get their free ID,” Amaro said.

I liked hearing that.

I think a primary duty of boards of election is to make sure voting is accessible and fair. I am happy to see Amaro —  who had served as interim director and got the permanent job in September of 2022 — following in the footsteps of Terri Robertson, the longtime and well-respected county elections director.

The meaning of the ballot

Now, as for those “I Voted” stickers.

People tend to like them, not just me — and that’s why elections people use them. You’ll recall the COVID-19 pandemic caused Cumberland County and many other boards to put the stickers on pause; ours did not return until last year’s races, Amaro said.

My wife, Sarah, and I often take our children, Sam, 10, and Helen Ann, 8, to the polling sites with us so they can see the process up close and personal, and yes I am a nerd when it comes to democracy, if you have not guessed. Sometimes the kids goof around or wander where they are not supposed to at the precinct, earning a corrective word or two from us — or one of the poll workers.

But it’s worth it.

And they love getting the stickers. My daughter is a sticker fiend of the first order already (you should see her water bottle.)

My parents would bring me to the polls, too, when I was a child.

They also made sure we three Pitts boys knew what it meant to vote. They grew up during segregation in Georgia.

In Marshall Sr. and Carol Pitts’ household, we were educated on the Civil Rights movement — and well beyond what we learned in schools. We knew people bled the ground red so we could exercise our American right to cast a ballot — Black Americans and their white allies, including Jewish Americans, who played an outsized role in the movement.

Our children, Sam and Helen Ann, are learning the same. One of the books I bought for Sam when he was 6 or so was “March,” a graphic novel by and about Civil Rights hero John Lewis.

The book reinforces the message: Elections are free to voters, but there was a huge cost that went into it.

So an “I Voted” sticker is more than a sticker.

I look forward to seeing what stickers the schoolchildren come up with to honor voting, which Lewis called an almost sacred right.

Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3559.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: ‘I Voted’ contest for Cumberland school students is about more than a sticker