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Voters pick their favorite Florida license plate

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By Keith Morelli | Tribune Staff
Published: December 29, 2012

A campaign-weary Florida electorate again went to the polls, this time casting online ballots over the past three weeks to decide the design of the new Sunshine State license plate.

The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles let the popular vote decide which of four designs will grace the rears of vehicles starting in 2014. The four designs came from a committee that included state agency personnel, law enforcement, tax collectors and others.

The winner features solid green bars at top and bottom and an artsy orange forming the "O" in the word "Florida." It garnered 15,441 of 50,124 votes cast.

"I think we wanted everybody to vote, but we understand it's a busy time of year," said department spokeswoman Kirsten Olsen-Doolan. "I was impressed that so many people voted for no reward of any kind other than to state their preference."

The online poll is only one part of the process of selecting the new plate design, which is undertaken by the state every 10 years.

The public's favorite is the one the department "will carry forward" in the process, she said. It will be presented to the governor, his Cabinet and other policymakers, though their recommendations are only suggestions, she said.

"We have the responsibility of getting plates on vehicles," Olsen-Doolan said. "But being that the governor and Cabinet are the bosses, they like to have a say in what we're doing."

The final design still is up in the air, she said, though the sooner it gets everyone's approval, the more quickly the wheels of manufacturing get rolling.

"We'd like to get them ready by 2014," she said.

While invitations to negotiate are being sent to manufacturers, Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises, which uses prison labor in training programs, still gets a preference under state law, she said.

The new plates won't cost registered vehicle owners more because every renewal carries a cost that pays for the new plate when it's due. The new plates will have a seven-character configuration to accommodate the expected increase in vehicles registered in Florida, she said.

Eighteen million vehicles are registered in Florida and 15 million display the basic plate, she said. The rest have specialty, vanity or otherwise personal type plates.