L x. R Miller, Your right to vote is your opportunity to protect, over here the freedoms for which Americans fight over there, c. 1943, Print (poster): offset lithograph, color, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Collection
Printed in the colors of the American flag, this 1943 poster depicts a right hand pulling a lever in a voting booth. The caption, “Your Right to Vote is Your Opportunity to Protect Over Here the Freedoms for which Americans Fight Over There,” is written in everyday language and makes strategic use of the words “your,” “right,” “opportunity,” “protect,” “freedoms,” and “fight.” By equating voting with the war effort and the service of troops fighting abroad, the poster reminds US citizens that voting is both their civic duty and the “right” thing to do. In our contemporary moment, political propaganda is often considered “partisan”, or one-sided. This US poster from the Word War II era is agit prop meant to rally the entire US electorate behind the core ideals of the great US experiment in representative democracy: freedom of enterprise, freedom of worship, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.