State Flag Results

Looks like common sense won - the current design won by a large margin:

• Illinoisans have spoken: Don’t go changing our flag.

  The public had a chance to vote for a new flag from one of 12 designs or keep the current one. And after five weeks of voting, the current flag won — and by a lot.

  Of the nearly 385,000 votes cast, more than 165,000 went to the current flag — receiving more votes than the next five top designs combined. Second place earned 32,898 votes, Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias announced Thursday.

Mayoral / US Senate hopeful Alexi "the bankruptor" Giannouolias has some big words to use:

• “Some may call it an SOB — a seal on a bedsheet — and the vexillological community may hate it, but people overwhelmingly prefer our current state flag,” Giannoulias said in a statement.

Or, more likely, Illinoisans are noticing that state government is a decidedly un-serious bunch of assholes, spending money that doesn't exist on something that doesn't need to be fixed and made their voices heard. Remember, you could vote once a day, every day, from every single computer device you owned or had access to. One day, we voted seven different times, just to see if we could do it.

And the "North American Vexillological Association"? It's about 1,000 people in 32 countries, many not even in North America itself. Who gives a rat's ass what they think?

But, even with voters overwhelmingly telling the people running this state into the ground to knock it off and do something responsible, guess what?

• The Illinois Flag Commission will now prepare a report based on results of the poll for the General Assembly by April 1. Lawmakers will then vote on whether to keep the current flag, return to a previous version or adopt a new one.

That's right. There's a "commission" (paid with tax money?) that has to prepare a report (paid with tax money?) that has to present the finding to Springfield. And even with the vote totals in hand, lawmakers could still do something completely stupid and change it anyway, meaning all that money was pissed away with a result they could ignore, and then proceed to spend millions more retrofitting buildings, uniforms, stationery, road signs, websites, etc with money that Illinois can't afford.

Keep an eye on this April Fools Day.