OH COME ON.
Of all the things that Iowans can’t find agreement on, “license plates” probably wasn’t on the list a decade ago.
In 2017, the state offered voters three choices for a new license plate. A reworked version of the 1997 design, with a somewhat garish green stripe, won a plurality of the nearly 300,000 votes cast.
And a notable percentage of Iowans hate it. They hate it so much that they would buy specialty color plates from a tiny college in northwest Iowa so it wasn’t on their vehicles. They hate it so much that the Iowa Legislature wedged in a section in a bill allowing “blackout” plates, with white on black letters, to become an official design available for a fee.
They hate the standard plate so much that multiple counties sold out of their stock of blackout plates in less than three months. They hate, hate, HATE it so much that the blackout plate is now the most popular specialty plate in the state. WHO Radio says that 94% of Iowa’s license plates sold are still the standard ones, but that seems destined to drop.
Iowans hate the standard license plate so much that nearly an entire quarter of the House is supporting a bill to make one of the plates that LOST the vote, in an entirely different color scheme, available in the same manner as the blackout plates. Should this pass, that would make FIVE main varieties of Iowa license plates: 1997 (well, 2012 black alphanumeric) and 2017 series, each with various decal options; the yellow-background college plates with black/red/purple print; the blackout plates; and this “Flying Our Colors” plate that turns the Iowa flag on its side. Line them up and you could think they’re from five different states.
Maybe Bernie Sanders is right, that there is such a thing as too many choices. That, or some things are just too important to be left to democracy.