LEBANON — Two “I voted” stickers drawn by Upper Valley fifth graders will be among the six offered to New Hampshire voters at the polls next November.
Nirali Batra, of Etna, and Mahima Singh, of Lebanon, were among more than 2,800 fourth and fifth graders who participated in the second-ever statewide contest hosted by the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s Office.
Nirali and Mahima, both 10, are the first Upper Valley winners of the contest, which was hosted once before in 2023.
Staff in the Secretary of State’s Office and a panel of municipal election officials judged the entries on “creativity, inclusivity of all voters and New Hampshire focus.” Artists were also encouraged to consider the theme of “celebrating 250 years of New Hampshire history.”
Both girls love drawing and jumped at the chance to participate in the contest they learned about at their schools.
Nirali’s final product features a smiling New Hampshire proudly standing atop New Hampshire’s White Mountains with the stars and stripes in the background and a forest of fall trees in the foreground.
“I tried to make it so it was really warm and welcoming,” Nirali said Monday.
Hers was the only winning design to include New Hampshire as a character. She wanted to show that “little New Hampshire” was “really happy about voting.”
Nirali said she knows a lot of people come to New Hampshire to see the fall foliage and to hike the White Mountains, so she wanted to include those.
The win was “well deserved,” Nirali’s mom Nikki Batra said. “We were very proud of her and excited because we knew how much time and effort she took in putting the design together.”
Nirali took a crowd-sourcing approach to developing her sticker design.
When her art teacher at the Bernice A. Ray School told her class about the competition in September, she was “really excited” and opted to use her 20 minutes of daily free time to make enough designs to hand out to her whole class, she said.
“I was really bored and I wanted to practice,” Nirali said. When she got home from school, she kept drawing and redrawing new designs.
She made some designs with purple lilacs, the state flower, in place of the fall trees, but said she asked her classmates which they preferred and they steered her towards including trees over flowers.
Mahima, too, opted to include the White Mountains, a drawing of New Hampshire and fall leaves in her winning sticker design.
The sticker also includes a license plate, a smiling version of the Old Man of the Mountain and a happy moose.
For a voting-themed flair, Mahima added a banner reading “Presidential Primary ‘First in the Nation’ ” and drew a license plate to read “VOTE NH” to make the theme “more bold,” she said.
She was inspired by the colors and boldness of many of the icons she included. For the Old Man of the Mountain, she drew his typically stern face with a smile.
“It was wonderful to see that she learned so much about New Hampshire and she had too much to put it on the paper,” her mother Swetha Mayuri Tatineni said.
For weeks, Mahima “refined and refined and refined” her design to decide what to include and what wouldn’t fit, Mayuri Tatineni said.
Throughout the process Mahima referenced a “big book” of New Hampshire history that she made last year in fourth grade, to decide what to include. She also added aspects of New Hampshire she hopes to experience for herself someday, such as hiking Mount Washington and seeing a moose.
After more than five drafts, there were some things that didn’t fit in her final design, such as lilacs, Mahima said. Still, the hard work paid off.
“I’m really happy with the final result,” Mahima said.