Chocolate bars fair game for election material, AG says

ALTON — Campaign advertisements are inescapable during election season. Print ads decorate the margins of newspapers, physical yard signs erupt from the ground in neighborhoods and intersections, while more impassioned voters become human billboards for their favored candidates with buttons, T-shirts and ball caps. Until now, voters couldn't eat campaign materials.

This year, candy bars made their debut on the New Hampshire election scene, and not without controversy. State House District 7 Republican primary candidate David Hershey was reported to the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office for giving away fun-sized Hershey bars to prospective voters outside of his local polling station.

“In all of the years I have done elections monitoring (more than 25), no one has had candy bars,” Associate Attorney General Anne Edwards said, calling the activity “a new approach to campaigning.”

There appears to be no bloodline link between Hershey and the Pennsylvania-based chocolate corporation.

One of Hershey's opponents, incumbent Rep. Paul Terry, made the complaint to the attorney general's Office after he confronted Hershey about his charitable chocolateering outside the doors of St. Katharine Drexel Parish on Tuesday morning.

“The concern was that David Hershey was handing out small, bite-sized Hershey bars to voters,” Edwards explained. “[Terry] felt that Mr. Hershey was too close to the door and handing things outside the electioneering zone. I spoke with the local moderator, she'd been out there a few different times and she didn't believe he was doing anything wrong outside the electioneering zone.”

Terry's complaint was taken seriously, and an investigator from the AG's office drove out to Alton just to make sure everything was above board.

“As I understand it, [the investigator] spoke with the moderator,” recalled Hershey, who was not punished for his chocolate handouts. “The moderator prior to the investigator did not see that there was a violation. The investigator approached the moderator, they agreed there wasn’t a violation, and the investigator left.”

According to Edwards, one of the more valid concerns was the closeness of the electioneering border to the entrance of the church, but this was not specifically tied to Hershey.

“[The moderator] felt that anyone who had the same position Hershey had was closer to voters than they should be, so she adjusted the zoning line,” Edwards said. “With respect to the handing out of the Hershey bars, he was handing out bite-sized bars. They're allowed to hand out buttons, pencils, pens or stickers with their names on it, so while this was different, it didn't seem to be of more value than those things.”

“The assertion was that I was looking to influence or purchase votes by giving out gifts of value,” Hershey said. “Which I think, according to my last calculation, the candy bars were about 11 cents apiece.”

Campaign material like fliers, buttons, pins, voter guides or even political hats cannot be visible once a voter enters a polling station, and the chocolate bars were no exception. Despite the unconventional nature Mr. Hershey's tactics, Edwards asserted that moderators appropriately handled to the situation.

“When I talked with the moderator in Alton, she did say just like any other electioneering material, she was making people put the Hershey bars in their pockets,” Edwards said. “They were not allowed to leave the wrappers in the voting booth, either.”

Hershey was not the only campaigner to use candy in his election efforts this year.

“We had Hershey handing out Hershey bars in Alton, and we had another group, I can't recall who, handing out little bit-sized chocolate bars with different candidates' faces and names on them,” Edwards said. “It just shows you that you can get a name and logo put on anything.”

The associate attorney general also pointed out the use of custom “easy up” pop-up tent covers with candidate names printed on the roofs as another new campaign tactic this year in the Granite State.

“If the candidate walked away from it for any period they had to cover it up because it would have been an unattended sign,” Edwards explained.

Although passing out candy, custom or otherwise, appears to be fair play, Edwards was quick to point out that there are limits.

“One of the things we talked about is that they are bite-sized, so they don't have a value greater than pencils or stickers,” Edwards said. “If someone was handing out a 5-pound bar of Hershey chocolate, we might want to talk about that.”

Edwards did add that it would “certainly be a challenge to electioneer with very large chocolate bars.”

Terry could not be reached for comment on this story.