While half the country was duking it out with weird little pens and hole punchers and touch screens, states like Texas, who won't see any red hot electing until early March, apparently decided that they wanted to be involved in a voting process, any voting at all, and so they decided that they'd go completely insane over deciding which new license plate design they want. There were four new designs presented, ranging from "Traditional Texas" to "Natural Texas," and people were so nuts to pick their favorites that they created a bit of a headache for the state's DMV:

On Monday at noon, the Texas Department of Transportation opened online voting for the new 2009 license plate.

So many people hit the agency's site in the first 30 minutes, it crashed, according to Kim Sue Lia Perkes, spokeswoman for TxDOT's Vehicles, Title and Registration division.

"We're really excited people want to vote. It tells us we've done the right thing to put it out there," Perkes said. "However, not all of the more than 20 million registered Texans can vote at once. So we've had a few glitches, people have slowed down the system."