In open-list proportional representation (OLPR) systems, candidates must obtain personal votes to succeed. Hence, many analysts infer that intra-party competition during electoral campaigns is the norm in such systems: because they need to direct votes to themselves, candidates from the same party list would have to compete against one another for the votes their party receives, weakening, therefore, ties between voters and parties. This perspective neglects the roles parties play in organizing electoral contests. In this paper, we examine ways in which intra-party competition is mitigated in a context where parties are universally considered to play little or no role. Specifically, we investigate how parties compose their list of candidates to avoid geographic overlap among competitive candidates. We use a new dataset with election results at the level of the polling station for Brazilian elections between 2010-2018 and employ measures of spatial overlap to show that competition between members of the same party is mild, whereas it is intense among candidates from different parties. The paper highlights the importance of thinking of the multiple and varied roles parties play in elections, even in contexts where they are believed to be weak and close to irrelevant.