An English-language voting poster in the National Archives' file of posters distributed in Asia, catalog date 8 October 1951. A woman drops a VOTE slip into a padlocked ballot box while a man in a straw hat sleeps under a tree. The printed credit names the National Movement for Free Elections and the League of Women Voters (NAID 5730163).
The picture
A woman in a dress with butterfly-style sleeves drops a slip marked VOTE into a padlocked box. Under a tree nearby, a man in a straw hat is asleep, with "ZZZZ" drawn above him. The headline settles the comparison in the woman's favor.
VOTE
BALLOT
BOX
Published by the National Movement for Free Elections and League of Women Voters
The WOMAN who votes
has outdone the MAN
who didn't !
The message is one any republic should welcome. Vote; do not sleep through the election. The archive tags it with bandwagon and plain folks: ordinary people are shown doing their civic duty, and the man who stayed home is the joke. Mocking a non-voter is a light touch as these things go, and the poster asks for nothing but participation.
The harder question is who was speaking. The sheet's own credit line names two civic groups, the National Movement for Free Elections and the League of Women Voters. The National Archives files it in Record Group 306 with propaganda posters distributed in Asia, and the rights line names the U.S. Information Agency and the Department of State. The archive grades the source as unidentified, "source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure." In plain terms, a reader of the sheet would have seen a civic credit, and the U.S. government's part, as the archive records it, is not on the face of the sheet.
Helping people vote is a decent aim. But the same principle that makes a free vote valuable, that citizens judge for themselves, argues for telling them who is talking.
Related pages
A 1953 notice distributed in the Philippines and signed NAMFREL, Crooked Politicians Are Elected by Honest People Who Don't Vote!, makes the same argument with registration dates. Everybody's Listening, filed with the same Asia posters in 1951, advertises a Voice of America program. The U.S. Information Agency hub covers the government's posters printed for audiences abroad.
Sources
- FRAME object record, The Woman Who Votes Has Outdone the Man Who Didn't! (English poster distributed in Asia), catalog date 8 October 1951. Printed credit: National Movement for Free Elections and League of Women Voters; filed with the U.S. Information Agency poster series "Propaganda Posters Distributed in Asia." Source graded as unidentified.
- U.S. National Archives, Record Group 306, Propaganda Posters Distributed in Asia, NAID 5730163, local id 306-PPA-262, catalog record, retrieved by the archive 3 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work; NARA RG 306), U.S. Information Agency / Department of State.
