About this vote
In July 2026 the European Central Bank shortlisted ten banknote designs and invited everyone in Europe to say which they preferred. You could pick from ten. This is the same exercise with the entry list left open.
Not the ECB
This site is a parody made by the Politieke Popcorncast. It has no connection to the European Central Bank, the Eurosystem or any national central bank, and no result here influences anything. The real consultation is on the ECB website, and it is worth your time.
The rules
- Anyone can enter. One image per entry, horizontal or vertical.
- Every image is cropped to the proportions of a real 5 euro note, so nothing wins by being bigger.
- Entries go into one of 5 categories: People, Animals, Dishes, Moments, Buildings.
- You confirm your entry by email. Nothing is published until you click the link, and the address is never shown or shared.
- Voting closes on 21 September 2026, the same day as the real consultation. Winners are named in each category and one overall.
How votes are counted
A public vote with no login is easy to take part in and easy to rig. The usual answer is to make voting harder for everyone, which mostly punishes the people voting honestly. This site does the opposite: voting stays open and unauthenticated, and suspect votes are given less weight rather than blocked.
Weighting
Each vote carries a weight between 0.15 and 1, based on:
- whether the browser passed the anti-bot check at least once,
- how long the anonymous ballot has existed,
- whether the voter looked at several designs or exactly one,
- how fast votes are arriving from that ballot.
Votes sharing a network are then scaled by one over the square root of their count on that design. Ten votes from one office or one VPN exit count for roughly three; a single vote from that network is untouched. A school or a shared household is not penalised, and a hundred tabs from one machine buy almost nothing.
Ranking
Entries are ordered by the lower bound of a Wilson score interval on the weighted totals. In plain terms it asks what the true approval rate is likely to be given how many people actually looked, so a handful of upvotes cannot outrank a large and mostly positive response.
What this site stores
If you only vote: a random identifier in a signed cookie, the designs you voted on, and a one-way hash of your network prefix. No name, no address, no account. The hash exists to notice that forty votes arrived from one network. It cannot be turned back into an address.
If you submit a design: additionally your display name, your email address, and your image. The name appears next to your entry. The email is used to confirm the submission and to tell you when it is live, and for nothing else.
Analytics: the site uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which designs people actually look at. That sets a Google cookie. Nothing about how you voted or what you submitted is sent to it.
Want an entry taken down? Report it with the button on its page, or write to stijn@pointiful.com.
Moderation
Every upload is screened automatically before it can appear. Anything clearly against the rules is refused at once; anything the screening is unsure about waits for a person. Once live, any visitor can report a design and it lands in a human inbox with a one-click takedown.
Caricature and ridicule of politicians and public figures is expected and allowed. Sexual content, hate symbols, slurs, gore and abuse of private individuals are not.