Ulster County “I Voted” Sticker Spider Is A Midterm Election Hero

Born in a county competition to design an “I Voted” sticker, the freaky little spider thing was designed by Hudson Rowan, a 14-year-old from Marbletown. Hudson’s design won by a landslide, snagging a whopping 93% of the votes. More than 225,000 people voted in the online contest, far more than the county’s entire population (voter fraud?!?!?).

The six-legged nightmare quickly became something of a hometown hero. The county’s election commissioner dressed up as it for Halloween. A deputy mayor and a candidate for state Assembly memorialized it with actual tattoos. Its popularity has reached far beyond the county, too — T-shirts from Hudson’s official merch shop are the must-have Election Day look, and Instagram featured it as a digital sticker. The actual stickers are going for over $50 a pop on eBay.

Hudson never imagined his art could be destined for such renown — in fact, he’d been reluctant to even enter the fray, only doing so to get his mom off his back.

“When she told me about it, I wasn’t totally, like, psyched on the idea. I don’t know, it wasn’t really my thing,” Hudson said in an interview with CBS. “I thought if I submit this, my mom will stop asking me to submit it.”

Hudson wasn’t really sure how he landed on his artistic vision but said it’s reminiscent of some of his earliest work. “When I was little, I used to paint a lot, and I used to paint these things I would call spider robots, which was just like a circle with legs,” he said.