Texans get online and VOTE … for your next license plate

My fellow Texans, here is your chance to go online and cast your vote for our new 2009 state license plate. The voting started on February 4th and you have until noon on February 11th to submit your vote for one of five designs, including the current license plate. All four new designs feature Texas on the top and “The Lone Star State” on the bottom.

The four new options are:

1. New Texas – A red, white and blue design featuring a composite of Texas urban skylines at the bottom.

2. Traditional Texas – Blue highlights and a white background with a gold Lone Star.

3. Lone Star Texas – A white Lone Star in the top left-hand corner of the plate against the Texas sky with a mountain range across the bottom. This plate gets my vote. It reminds me of what my idea of Texas was when I was growing up. Nothing but mountain ranges and cowboys.

4. Natural Texas – The plate is covered with a picture of wild flowers. My mother loves Texas wildflowers, especially the blue bonnets. If she lived in Texas, this is the plate she would vote for.

5. The current license plate – A cowboy, space shuttle, and moon design was introduced in 2000. Since its introduction TXDOT has manufactured 31.5 million of the plates.

What’s the reason for the new plates? TXDOT is about to run out of possible number and letter combinations with the existing six-character system. The 2009 plate will be a seven-character system.

Now the thing that you have to understand is We Texans just LOVE our State. I have lived in numerous states in my life, but none of them compares to the love the residents of Texas have for their state.

The initial voting response has been overwhelming. In the first 30 minutes, the quantity of traffic crashed the TXDOT’s web site. Hmmm, maybe there’s a good idea here to be applied to other forms of voting. What if we could vote for Presidential candidates online or via our cellphones? Maybe it is just what we need to get more people to VOTE.