Nobody can actually agree on who invented the "I Voted" sticker, and that might be the most American thing about it.
Tim and Andrea trace the sticker back past its familiar 1987 design, sketched at a dining room table by a geologist named Janet Boudreau, through a 1920 women's suffrage button and a wave of "VOTE" branded gear made for a newly-enfranchised generation of 18 year olds in the 1970s. Then they zoom out from the sticker to the messier history underneath it, the open, sometimes violent public voting of the mid-1800s, and the slow shift to a private, secret ballot by the turn of the century. Along the way they run the actual numbers on who's eligible to vote versus who actually shows up, and the gap is worse than either of them expected going in. The episode closes back where the series started, tying the sticker to Episode 1's "all men are created equal" line through five constitutional amendments and the Voting Rights Act, the better part of two centuries spent trying to make that promise literally true at the ballot box.
A two-cent sticker. A much bigger, still-unfinished argument about who actually gets a say.
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