Here’s some news on a representative bit of Republican Party slime from Riverside County, California, home to some of the slimiest Republicans in known space. From California Watch:
In a complaint filed last week with the county registrar of voters, the Democrats presented affidavits from 133 Democratic voters who said they had been re-registered as Republicans without their consent after they encountered petition circulators outside welfare offices and stores.
One voter complained that his registration was changed to Republican after he signed what he thought was a petition to legalize marijuana. Another said he was told he was signing a petition to lower the price of gasoline, according to the affidavits.
Others said they were offered free cigarettes or a “job at the polls” if they signed some paperwork.
Also among the Democrats who said they were involuntarily re-registered as Republicans: two aides to retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard Roth, a Democrat locked in a tight race with Republican Assemblyman Jeff Miller for a state Senate seat.
According to Democratic Party spokespeople, thousands of people might have been fraudulently re-registered with a Republican Party affiliation. Riverside County is getting slightly more liberal each year for a number of demographic reasons, and yet the county’s Republican Party reported an upswing of 35,000 new Republican voters in the county.
Oh, and here’s a shocker from the California Watch report:
Many of the complainants were Latino or African American.
But wait! There’s more! http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/local-govt-politics/questionable-palm-beach-county-voter-registration-/nSL5Y/
Lower the price of gasoline? Hm. I’d sign a petition to raise it. Seems like the poll would catch more Republicans than Democrats.
Not at all surprised (note the “cynical” part of my current ‘nym).
Back in 1988, I lived in New Hampshire (in college at the time). I registered to vote in a voter registration drive in a shopping mall in Keene, New Hampshire. ProtoWife and I shared an apartment in Peterborough at the time, so I was legal. Imagine my surprise when I got a visit from the local GOP bigwig thanking me for registering as a Republican. I told him he was mistaken, that I had registered as a Democrat. Turned out that everyone who registered that day had registered as a Republican. Which meant that my voter registration paperwork was changed. It also meant that I couldn’t vote in the Democratic primary which was the whole reason I registered.
Yet another reason I like living in Washington state where we don’t have to register a party, and have a top two system. If the Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians don’t like it, they can pay to choose their own candidates.
Which is what we told a college friend who was hired by all three parties to argue against the top-two ballot in front of the Supreme Court. They lost. He still disagrees, but we all still friends.
I like that the two states I’ve lived in have open primaries. You don’t declare which ballot you want to fill out until you are where you are given the ballot. Back in the old mechanical voting machine booth days, that meant pulling the lever behind the curtain.
Which is another reason why I always tell them I NEVER sign petitions.
If they ask why, I tell them that paid petition-circulators are slightly more harmful to California than drug pushers.
I don’t see what the payoff was for the party, by the way, aside from slightly lowering Democratic registration. It’s not like the people pushed over to Republican status were going to vote for Romney.
The GOP hired crooks, and complain when they themselves get cheated. (Unless, of course, the petition-pushers simply trashcanned the Democratic registration forms, if any.)
Well, it takes people off the rolls for Democratic Party Get Out The Vote efforts is the main thing I can see.
The GOP is a fucking organized crime syndicate. It’s rotted all the way through.
Sigh. People, READ the papers before you sign them.
If you don’t understand what you’re signing, then don’t sign.
That being said, someone needs to be in prison.
As an Australian, your political voting system fucking baffles me. It appear that there exists layer upon layer of abstraction away from the simple casting of a vote, tallying the votes, and delaring the posessor of the most votes the winner.
To explain, here is the Australian process:
1) Register as a voter before the next election after turning 18. This simply means that you are on the electoral roll, to be checked off when you do vote (which happens to be compulsory). Your enrolment does not align you with any political group.
2) Turn up at the polling booths at basically any time over the election day, get pestered by swarms party volunteer campaigners. Think of a flock of seagulls, except instead of trying to steal your chips, they are showering you in slogans and leaflets.
3) Vote.
3.1) You can either rank all entries on the list in order of preference, or choose a party and let them rank your preferences for you; obviously they will allocate your first preference to themselves, but the rest will depend on whatever agreements they have struck with other parties. These agreements are generally of the form ‘if you place my party high on your preference order, we will help you getting such and such a bill passed’ and such. This bit is prone to a bit of wheeling and dealing, but the rest is largely transparent.
4) First preferences get tallied; the loser of this round is eliminated. All votes for that defunct party are now redistributed according to the second preference listed. After this round is tallied, the loser is elminated and so on until there is a party with an unassailable lead*.
In short, the act of registration does not carry any allegiance. If I understand correctly… American voters register as one or the other, which enables them to vote for which individual they think should lead that party (the primary)? After which, there is the mojor for for which party takes the majority (an hence which candidate takes the presidency)? And somewhere in the mix is a thing called an electoral college which… does something… which determines the party lead somehow…
It’s a mess. That could be taken to mean that my uderstanding of your system is a mess, or that the system itself is a mess, or a bit of each.
Meanwhile I hear British elections are pushing to increse their complexity – and hence opacity – beyond that of the current ‘first past the post’ system. DON’T DO IT!
*This description probably makes it sound like there are loads of options… in a way, that is correct, but only two of the parties actually have the numbers and influence to actually have a chance at victory.
Not really. Currently federally the lower house is a majority only with support of independants and minor party. The upper house similarly requires minor party support to allow bills to pass.
Holms,
The American system retains the traces of the original compromises required to adopt the Constitution. Each state has latitude in how it conducts elections, including primaries. In some states, as I understand it, one can vote in any party’s primary. In others, you are stuck with your registered party at the primary. In Florida, where I live, those with no party affiliation can only vote in primaries in which there are not party affiliations. In other states, the non-affiliated can vote in whichever primary they want.
The Electoral College is a remnant of the compromises required to originally adopt the Constitution. There is still a strong sense of states’s independence from the federal government, and they are given latitude in how they conduct elections, even for federal offices. Because Florida, California, New York, and Texas could pretty much decide every election the Electoral College keeps states with smaller populations relevant.
Re: #11, Holms…
Umm… No.
First, voting laws vary by state. The US has very few laws regarding parties, registration or voting at the national level.
In general, party registration concerns primaries, which is where each party decides–through voting–who their nominee will be. In some states, you can only vote in the primary of the party you have registered with. In others, you get to decide when you go to the polls. As a registered voter in California as an independent (no party affiliation), I get to pick which primary party ballot I want (if the party permits it) at the polls.
In the general election, where party affiliation has no bearing, one gets to vote for whomever one wishes, regardless of party. There is no requirement to vote a straight party ticket. (In some states, with some voting machines, it was possible to pull one level and for all the candidates for different offices from the same party. I don’t know if that is still done. It was never–so far as I know–done in California.)
Traditionally, it has been the case that the winner of each party’s primary advances to the general election. California has now changed that so that the two top vote getters in the primary go on the general ballot, regardless of party affiliation, so it is theoretically possible to have two candidates from a single party on the general election ballot for a particular office. I haven’t heard of that occurring…yet.
The one party restricted competitions one generally sees are elected party officials that used to appear on party-only ballots.
I guess that is what happens when you have
A) the primary system the US seems to love so much (if you want a say in who your party’s candidate is, join the fscking party!)
B) the states all running their own individual part of federal elections (it would seem to make sense to have one consistent system for federal elections)
Like Holms, as an Australian, the adherence to 18th century electoral procedures seems ‘quaint’ to say the least, although ‘bat-sh*t crazy’ seems closer to the mark.
California’s Eighth Congressional District. Choices in the general election are the Republican Party’s Paul Cook and the Republican Party’s Gregg Imus. Cook is a wingnut: Imus is a Tea Party-endorsed former cofounder of the California Minutemen. Have I mentioned that’s my district? sigh.
Well, how else are Republicans going to get minorities to join a party that hates them?
There’s more to it than that. It’s not that slimy exactly. They don’t really get anything by fraudulently reregistering people as republicans except that the petition worker gets $4.
That’s the entire motivation. The Republicans pay $4 to register a voter as Repubican. And $0 for Democrats. This money is paid by the Republican Party in the state. I’ve been tempted to register Republican a number of times just to cost them four bucks. Then change it back over the internet a month later or so.
Yeah, this is slimy but it really costs the Republicans cash for people who won’t really vote for them.
Another vote here for “Antipodean who finds the American electoral system fucking confusing”. Mind you, here in NZ we have MMP.
Also for Holms (and any other confused non-U.S.ians):
There’s no guarantee that the President’s party will hold a majority in either house of Congress (or that the House and Senate, the lower and upper houses, will have the same party in majority). In the major elections in the fall, Americans at the polls will vote for:
a) a slate of electors pledged to support the Presidential candidate the voter wishes
b) the voter’s preferred candidate for whichever of their state’s Senate seats may be up for election, and
c) the voter’s preferred candidate for the local Representative (where the districts can make up several towns, a small city, or a portion of a bigger city; each district has somewhere shy of a million residents).
d) all relevant candidates for state and local positions, propositions, etc.
So there’s no “vote for a party,” really. Just an assload of individual, often heavily gerrymandered first-past-the-post elections. And making it worse is that “slate of electors” bit in a), which is what we call the Electoral College:
Each state is assigned a number of “electors” equal to the total number of members of Congress from that state (both Representatives and Senators). Since all states have two Senators, while Representatives are roughly proportional to population, small-population states tend to have more electoral votes per citizen. All of the votes of the electors from a state go to whichever Presidential candidate has the most votes in that state (usually, generally…). A candidate who receives the majority of the electoral votes is elected President. (If there is no majority, it gets worse…) There are historical reasons this scheme was adopted, but basically it means that in the U.S. we elect our Presidents based on a bizarre, baroque, and thoroughly unrepresentative variation on first-past-the-post voting. There is no system of proportional representation of any sort at the Federal level, which is part of why it’s so rare to have members of Congress who aren’t part of one of the two main parties. The exceptions are usually from states with smaller populations (e.g. Bernie Sanders, the only socialist in Congress, who’s from Vermont).
Just stumbled across this; Samual L Jackson urges the American electorate to Wake The Fuck Up!
Registering new voters as Republicans could fuck up the local GOTV people’s analysis when they’re trying to figure out who to contact in the weeks leading up to the election to mobilize them. Otherwise, I don’t see what it gets them. It’s not like we didn’t already know that they’re slimy.
My point was that there are only two parties in a position to vie for the top spot; the latest election was simply unusually close between the two.
I’m betting that this was enacted by the Republicans. Messing with voting choices seems to be their schtick in general, especially if the state is conservative dominated. Why have even a lopsided choice between liberal and conservative, when you can just replace the liberal with another conservative?
@20
Byzantine… Let me see if I have it right. The state’s citizens cast their vote for either candidate for the presidency. The electors looks at the final tally and sees that the majority vote is for Obama. The electors then cast their votes for Obama, totalling 2+number of reps. When tallying up the states across the nation, which is counted to determine the president – the elector votes or the citizen votes? In either case, I just can’t see any useful purpose to them at all, it seems to be a system designed to obfuscate the entire process.
The elector votes are what’s tallied. And to further confuse things, in some states, electoral votes are awarded proportionally to the total number of actual votes, and in others–most–it’s winner-take-all.
It’s a relic from the anti-democratic fear of mob rule days of the Constitutional framers. I believe they specifically intended it to serve as a bulwark between government and the common rabble, to the extent that electoral voters aren’t bound to reflect the popular vote in their home state.
The electoral vote is stupid. We should get rid of it. While we’re dreaming, let’s also abolish the speech-free filibuster. And pass publicly financed elections and instant runoff voting. And I’d like a flying pony.
There have been times–most recently in 2000–when the popular vote went one way and the electoral vote went another.
Hey man, you gotta stop those
democratsfraudulent voters.Because a real election would never have elected a
non-whiteforeignerDemocrat.</derail>
Holms,
I am a fellow confused non-USAian with regard to US electoral procedure. However, on the subject of UK elections, I am am relatively well-informed, having not failed to vote in any local and national election since reaching voting age back in the days of Thatcher, having campaigned on behalf of my political party for the Scottish Parliament (AMS), Scottish local elections (multimember-STV), English local elections (MM-FPTP) and Westminster elections (FPTP), and having spent a fair amount of time getting to grips with how the different systems operate, so that I can explain things on the doorstep.
And in my long-considered opinion, FPTP is an absolutely terrible system, whose only merit is that it is very quick to count the votes. In fact, even that is a dubious merit, because what has happened in Westminster elections is that local councils now compete to be the first to declare, creating a spectacle which distracts people from FPTP’s failings. These include:
* The system discourages you from voting for anyone except the incumbent or the nearest challenger, because you can’t specify a second or third choice should your favoured candidate fail to win, and therefore you have to either register a “protest vote” (i.e. voting for something you believe in rather than just supporting a party just because it’s likely to win, à la Man United).
* There is no obligation on any candidate to gain even a qualified majority support. It doesn’t matter that 70% of constituents think candidate A is a dangerous extremist if they split their vote and none of the other candidates get more than 30%.
* The above leads to “negative voting”, in that candidates and supporters of smaller parties are pressured to drop their own campaigns and support the candidate of the nearest challenger to prevent the “worst” (in local public opinion) candidate getting in, though this might simply mean that the candidate judged to be the “second worst” might win instead.
* In the above situation, voters and candidates who have the temerity to insist on voting or standing for a smaller party because they agree with its policies are accused of “splitting the vote” and therefore “letting the other side win”. This completely fails to appreciate that in a democracy, people have a right to support whichever party they choose, and that if their choices lead to paradoxical results, it is the voting system, not freedom of association, which is at fault.
* The system penalises support for a party whose support is more widely spread across the country than concentrated in heartlands. For instance, the Green Party, whose policies are arguably more popular than those of the major parties in blind testing (where voters are asked to select favoured policy options without knowing which party advocates them), have only ever managed to win one seat.
* As a result of this, it is possible for a single party to gain an absolute majority of seats in Parliament on well under half of the popular vote (and bear in mind that many of these votes are cast by people who felt that they had no option but to vote for that party or be accused of “wasting” or “splitting” votes). For example, in the 2005 election, Labour won only 35% of the popular vote, but 55% of the seats. The Lib Dems meanwhile won 22% of the popular vote, but less than 10% of seats.
All of this leads to a suppression of debate and a lack of realistic choice at English local and Westminster level, so that recent political debate (in England at least) has focused more on exactly how hard we should screw the poorest in society and exactly how fast we should dismantle the remaining public institution such as the NHS, despite widespread public opposition. It is worth noting that in the rest of the UK, where they have proportional voting systems, the devolved governments have not followed the example of Westminster, and their electorates seem to be happy with that.
Maybe your exhortation to keep FPTP is as a result of the fact that it’s only slight more unfair than AV, and less complex to administer. (I was living in South Melbourne in the run-up to the 2007 Federal Elections, and became well aware of all the back-room debates between parties about preferences on “how-to-vote” cards, and the issue of donkey voting by people who only turn up to vote because it’s compulsory).
However the best system is one that is simple for voters: one which can honestly say to them, “Your vote counts no less and no more than anyone else’s, no matter your constituency or your political allegiance. No-one will profit from your vote but the candidates you vote for. Now go and vote for what you believe in, and who you trust to argue your corner. Nothing else matters.” No system is perfect, but the system which get closest is multi-member STV. If the count is complicated and expensive, then that’s the price of ensuring a fair outcome, and I’m very happy to pay that price.
</derail>
Just like Holms, your election system is just baffling to me. It seems like it’s designed to allow multiple levels of corruption and being ‘gamed’.
Mind you from what I know virtually no system is perfect. We in the UK operate most votes/first past the post system which can easily lead to a party with the most votes overall being the minority. We’re possibly talking about moving to a system that sounds similar to what Holms describes the Aussie system as. Seems better but still not perfect.
@Red-Green in Blue
STV is an excellent system for electing an accurate representation of voters wishes.
Problem is it produces really weak government (maybe that’s not a bad thing) that don’t seem to be able to get anything done because they have to pander to every minority view.
@M, Supreme Anarch of the Queer Illuminati
That’s probably a really great summary of how the US election system works. But I don’t understand any of it.
The question I have is why does it matter who the voter is registered for? I got the point where there were those elections for who is going to run for president. But why does it matter when the actual vote happens? Don’t you just vote for the candidate you want then.
@RandomFactor
Actually, mightn’t they?
Among the huge variety of compliance/persuasion studies, there was one where they had people fill out a survey of binary beliefs, sign the bottom, and then they somehow altered the paper so that the answers to all the questions were the same but the questions had all been reworded in the opposite direction. When the subjects read back the survey and their answers, a certain percent of the subjects agreed with the new wordings, basically saying they now believed the opposite of what they had said before.
Now, I don’t know if that research was good and the results real, but if I were an amoral political operative, it would sound to me like if I could trick people to registering as Republicans, a certain percent of them would then become Republicans, out of some sort of obligation to be consistent with their past statements.
I think the key that is being missed by many who are wondering about how the US system works is that the primary’s are held for the benefit of the political parties, not for selecting a winner.
Declaring a party affiliation is for the primary elections, not the general elections. The party affiliation is also used by the various campaigns to help motivate and get out the vote, but the reason why there is so much variation in how party registration is handled is because each state has different laws on how they handle primary elections.
In some states you must be registered to a party to get the ballot for that party in the primary election. In other states you only need to declare what party you will be voting for at the time you receive your ballot. And there are some states which you can even split your ballot across parties. They all seem to work okay.
But these are votes in the primaries only. In the general election you are not bound by your party affiliation.
But, Chris! ACORN! Andandand pimps and Mickey Mouse!
It’s utterly unsurprising to see this kind of bullshit going on. If you were unlucky enough to be in SoCal during the recent primaries, the Rethuglicans were essentially mangia’d by the TBaggers. And you know where it goes from there…Liars for Jeebus and his ChozenCandydate™ up to your eyeballs. It certainly doesn’t help that one of the major area newspapers, the OC Register, is hysterically conservative and makes a lot of accidentally-on-purpose headline and copy errors that they can excuse away in a tiny retraction later on. The Op-Ed section is shameful, a Fox News in print social experiment run amok. You now see some of the results.
Charlie Foxtrot @21:
Freakin’ hilarious. I love Samuel L. Jackson. This is the first ever political ad I’ve ever seen that I can say really spoke to me.
Yeah! What with their submitting registration forms with obvious fake names as required by law! And and and with the videos of office workers nodding and being polite to a bizarrely dressed and potentially dangerous creep just to get him out of their office! How can the Republicans hope to keep up with that without
blatant fraudgetting their hands a little dirty like everyone else?@29 I didn’t see it immediately either, but as someone above pointed out, it matters in monkey-wrenching the Get Out The Vote efforts.
If this was done as am R party-planned effort, presumably they made a note of which voters they switched. If the party-switching was simply done by the worker to make the extra $4, then the party can find out later by making canvassing calls and asking who you intend to vote for. Either way, people who the Rs think will not vote for Rmoney either will not get a call from the Ds urging them to go vote, or they’ll get a call from the Rs reminding them to vote on Wednesday (elections in the US are held on Tuesday).
Ftr: Just yesterday, a Republican-allied “consulting” company was nailed for faking voter registration forms in Florida.
In matters of criminality, Californians have become mere copycats.
Holms
In Australia you have campaigners at the polling stations on election day?
Naked Bunny:
Youu know, I always wondered about that. I mean it has got to be illegal to trash a completed registration form, so what the hell are the organizations that collect them supposed to do?
Think about it this way: I went to high school with a Ricky Ricardo, a Michael Jackson, a boy named Lando* and a girl named Sparkle. Would you trust a volunteer to be able to pick out the fake names from these real ones?
*I wish I was joking. I never did find out if his middle name was Calrissian.
Audley Z. Darkheart (liar and scoundrel) wrote,
It’s actually a little subtler that that.
At one point, several election cycles ago, the organizations which collected registration forms were allowed to review them and throw out the obvious frauds. Some of them even went to the trouble to check names against addresses given and mark them as suspect.
Then these groups were accused, without evidence, of throwing away voter registration forms. The argument was that they must be throwing away republican forms because they were registering many more republicans than democrats. Which they were, probably due to the areas they were working in. There was no evidence that these organizations were systematically throwing away registration forms to promote one party over another. But they were accused of it.
So then legislation passed which made it illegal for them to throw away any forms. Which meant that it became public knowledge about how many of these things are filled out by people who really are not aware of what they were filling out. There were lots of cases where the registration forms were filled out by people who were already registered. But if you were approached by a fellow in the street and you were not entirely certain about the status of your registration, you’d fill in the form.
Which led to the wing-nut idea there was an conspiracy to create wide-spread voter registration fraud, which they conflated with voter fraud (a different animal entirely). And so we have an excuse to dis-enfranchise voters.
If we had simply trusted the organizations which collected the signatures to perform the due diligence they had been doing, none of this would have developed.
Obligatory link, since it’s been mentioned a few times:
Is your Cat confused about the alternative vote?
I really want AV in the US.
Except you really can’t because some of those organizations are throwing away legitimate registrations.
Thanks, Flex.
I’m not sure that I like this, actually. Like I pointed out, people have goofy names and if you live in an area that has, say, a lot of apartments that are rented on a month-by-month basis, it seems like there’s too much potential to throw out legit registrations. But, in light of the attempted purges of voter rolls in various states, we can’t trust state level government not to toss legitimate voters, either.
Blarg.
Audley Z. Darkheart (liar and scoundrel) wrote,
Depending on the state, that may prevent you from voting…
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781452.html
Many states have a 30-day residency requirement, meaning that you have to have lived at one address for at least 30 days.
Back to the voter registration topic.
Any voter registration drive is going to present an opportunity for partisan members to throw away registrations they don’t like. Simply making such a thing illegal won’t help all that much, the opportunity is large and the risk of getting caught is small. To correct the problem, measures to either reduce the risk of someone throwing a registration out, or increasing the risk they are caught if they do so.
Flex,
Once again. Thanks.
I guess I just don’t see much of a problem with fraudulent registrations, since no one is showing up to the polls claiming to be Mickey Mouse and voter (as opposed to registration) fraud is virtually non-existent. If the League of Woman Voters or whoever submits some bogus forms, who cares? I’d rather let some bad forms through than disenfranchise any voter.
In California, parties sued the state for the right to limit their elections to persons of their party. So we didn’t have open ballots. We recently passed the top-two law which was an end-run around this sorta thing, but it does limit get-out-the-vote stuff.
Because it would be really expensive to add in AV, so we went with the cheapest next-best: Top two. It’s slower than AV, but preserves our Primary/General election system – which as a state we can’t get rid of, because federal elections – but sometimes it does this. The support for top two was neither Republican or Democratic in nature. I supported it.
What top two does, is that you can vote for any Primary candidate, and then we re-vote on the top two in the General election. It still has the problems of FPTP in the Primary, but eliminates it for the general. This should give the moderate candidate in the General election a huge boost.
Ouch! What a way to have your vote taken away from you.
@rubymoon, good vid.
Me too. William Poundstone’s Gaming the Vote should be required reading.
flex @ 40:
This point bears repeating. There’s been a very successful effort to conflate any kind of election-related fraud (or even just incompetence) with voter fraud, even though voter fraud is something very specific. It’s important to distinguish between voter fraud, registration fraud, fraud in tallying votes, etc., particularly in the face of voter ID laws and other measures that would do nothing to address most types of fraud.
Even the title of PZ’s post creates a juxtaposition that seems to conflate what the Republicans did with voter fraud. It’s certainly election fraud, but it’s not voter fraud.
Got my absentee ballot in the mail today and it’s on regular copy paper instead of card stock. I vote in Riverside County, otherwise I wouldn’t be worried, but this is strange…
My Republican Dad just smugly informed me that I “witnessed” his absentee ballot, and have done so in previous years. And some poll worker is accepting that the handwriting of a much younger woman looks just like that of an 80+ man.
California’s Eighth Congressional District. Choices in the general election are the Republican Party’s Paul Cook and the Republican Party’s Gregg Imus.
motherfucking IMUS??
so glad I left that insanity.
I really do not see how they can sell the idea that there is voter fraud so convincingly without people seeing through it and them being shown to be the fools and crocks.
the only real fraud in this is the fraud committed upon the republican party who were paying a bounty for republican registrations and nothing for democrats.
If I had been asked to register and told that the republican party would pay the person doing the registration $5 if I claimed I was a republican, I might have been tempted knowing I could change party affiliation later.
I can’t see how it will change the results of the election much.
uncle frogy
@Chigau #38
Yes, Volunteers from political parties may stand outside polling places distributing how-to-vote cards. These cards show voters how political parties or candidates would like you to vote. They may be taken into the polling place to assist in marking ballot papers. There is a general prohibition on canvassing within six metres of an entrance to a polling place, which means that HTV cards or other non-AEC (Australian Electoral Commission) notices cannot be distributed or displayed within that distance. HTV cards must not be exhibited or left in a polling place by party volunteers.