Georgia License Plate Vote

Hands up who got the email that was doing the rounds a little while ago where you could click on a link and vote for the new GA license plate.  It hit my email inbox at least three times.  I voted for one of the three designs that had "In God We Trust" on the bottom where the owner's county of residence would normally be.  Apparently a lot of other people did too.  So many, in fact, that the three finalists were: (drumroll) all three designs that included the words "In God We Trust".  Looks like there are a lot of folks out there who like making this declaration to the world.  And good on them.

However (I bet you knew there would be a "however" to this post), according to this article on Yahoo, we misunderstood what we were voting for.  You see, although three of the pictures of the designs up for vote included the phrase "In God We Trust", what they didn't tell us is that you have to pay $1 extra to get a sticker with these words instead of the county sticker.  As the article says:  "The three online winners happened to be the ones with "In God We Trust" at the bottom, leading the state to believe that voters may have decided on the phrase instead of the design."  Ya think???

So how is the state handling this?  They are holding a second vote involving the three winning plates.  Only this time they are clarifying that the phrase is not part of the plate.  Okay, that's fine.  I don't particularly want to force people with different beliefs to have the phrase on their car.  And the good thing is that I now know that I can buy a sticker for $1 and plaster it over my car.  I guess my complaint/question is - why on earth wasn't this handled better so that we could save some time and taxpayer money?  If I fouled up that badly in my job, I'd likely be out of work.  But then that's the difference between civil servants (US: public servants) and those of us in the business world who pay their salaries.

The amusing part of this story is the claim that a certain gun enthusiasts' website was encouraging its readers to vote for the plate with a design showing a peach which looked remarkably like a horse's patootey.  ""If we win, everybody in Georgia state will be driving with horse's [rear] license plate".  Could be interesting...