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'I voted' stickers are everywhere. How did they start?

Mary Jo Pitzl

Arizona Republic

Sept. 23, 2025, 6:13 p.m. MT

I Voted stickers are everywhere at election time: on lapels, laptop covers, coffee cups and even the purses of famous pop stars.

         These popular stickers trace their ubiquity to crowded Phoenix streets, a political dealmaker and a band of gung-ho staffers at a Realtors office.

         It was 1985, and the civic temperature about traffic in the Valley was reaching a boiling point. "Build the damn freeways" became a rallying cry and helped lead to a countywide election to raise the sales tax by a half cent to build freeways.

         Proponents were concerned about voter turnout. That included the majority leader in the Arizona House, Rep. Burton Barr, a Phoenix Republican famous for the deals he would orchestrate at the state Legislature.

         At a meeting of what was then called the Phoenix Board of Realtors, the organization's operations director approached Barr, a freeway proponent, and asked how the organization could help.

         “He said the big problem is the afternoon turnout," Dennis Michael Burke said of Barr. "They always have a great turnout of morning voters, but the polls are dead in the afternoon.”

         Burke and Skip Rimsza, then the president of the Realtors board, brainstormed ideas. Posters? No, too small town. Campaign buttons? Nice idea, but the 20 cents per piece was too steep a price for a Valley population of more than 700,000 voters.

         Burke came up with the idea of a sticker, mimicking the campaign button idea, but much more cost efficient. The idea was the early-morning voters would wear the sticker and serve as a walking billboard to remind people to vote.

         Burke got designer Nikylla Lue Celine to create the image and thus was born the "I Voted Today" sticker, with the words overlaying three waving red and blue bands against a white background. The edge of the round sticker acknowledged the Realtors and the Maricopa County Elections Department.

         Burke said he offered to keep the Realtors reference off the sticker, but Keith Poletis, then the Maricopa County recorder, wanted to advertise that this was a public-private partnership.

         Trudi Rightsell, who was the board's special projects manager, remembered packing up the rolls of freshly printed stickers so Poletis' office could get them to polling places. The sticker project was a collaborative effort in the office, she said. And it took off.

         “We’d see them everywhere,” Rightsell said of the stickers.

         The sales tax hike passed with a nearly 2-to-1 margin. Burke acknowledged the demand for freeways was a big motivator, but gives the stickers credit, too.

         “Everybody was talking about it," he said. "And the afternoon turnout was great.”

Buoyed by the reaction, Rimsza touted the "I Voted" sticker idea at Realtor conventions. Poletis did the same in his election-related circles.

         "It took off like fire," said Rimsza, who went on to become Phoenix mayor.

         While there are accounts of stickers used in local elections pre-1985, the Phoenix Board of Realtors lays claim to giving them their widespread appeal.

         Since 1985, the board provided 30 million of the little decals for Phoenix and Valley elections, according to a 2008 news release from the organization.

         The message changed slightly, to say simply "I Voted" when mail-in voting started more than 30 years ago. Election officials statewide picked up the idea, styling the stickers to reflect local flavor. Pima County, for example, prints the sticker in three languages: English, Spanish and Tohono O’odham recognizing that the county lies within the tribe's ancestral boundaries.

         By 1986, a national campaign-supply company was pumping out "I Voted" stickers. Burke sent a roll of the 1985 stickers and Celine's original artwork to the Smithsonian.

         In Phoenix, Bridget Carroll Green was part of the crew that worked on the sticker project. She attributed its appeal to its nonpartisan nature.

         "I think there's a certain sense of pride," Green said. "Everybody I know — conservative, liberal, secular, religious — it's something that brings everyone together. There's no division when you're wearing your I Voted sticker."

         Burke said the stickers also convey a sense of unity around democratic principles, something he sees as imperiled given current circumstances.

         “Back in 1985, Republicans and Democrats wanted everybody to vote and believed in democracy," he said. "That’s the difference between then and now.”

Reach the reporter at 602-228-7566 and follow her on social media@maryjpitzl.