Clothing with election slogans and designs can come in a variety of forms from t-shirts and baseball caps to articles of clothing made with the election message worked directly into the fabric design, as occurs in Africa where women can literally become walking billboards for a cause.
Clothing items can be used to help promote voter education events and programmes, such as "Rock the Vote" style campaigns; to identify participants in those campaigns (or certain groups such as election monitoring or voter education teams); and to build momentum for citizen activism, for example encouraging people to register and to vote.
Cloth can be printed relatively cheaply using block prints, silk screening or more substantial printing methods.
Clothing items can be a self-financing means of spreading voter education messages and tend to be relatively easy to distribute due to popular demand. However, experience in developing countries is that education organizers end up paying for this clothing and do not recoup their initial investments.
Election regulations often restrict the wearing of certain types of clothing on election days. While these regulations are intended to avoid conflict and electioneering around voting stations, slogan and personality based clothing distributed by nonpartisan education groups can become confused with this, or even over time associated with a particular party or group of parties. Therefore local conditions must be taken into account when developing such materials.
In Taiwan, election clothing and related paraphernalia– mascots, head and armbands, water bottles, and all manner of noise making and banner waving artefacts– have become intrinsic to election campaigns. These have the advantage of bringing elections to life, see Political Parties in Voter Education: In other countries, such exuberant partisanship can be intimidating and limit freedom of movement and association. This has certainly been the case in elections conducted under conditions of latent and unresolved conflict or oppression.
