Yes there should be a by-election in Papatoetoe

Radio NZ reports:

A district court judge has reserved his decision on whether a by-election is needed in an Auckland local body election.

The hearing followed a petition by former Ōtara-Papatoetoe Local Board member Lehopoaome Vi Hausia, who claimed to have received reports of voting papers being stolen from residents and submitted without their consent.

Dale Ofsoske, an independent electoral officer for Auckland, was the respondent to the petition.

At a preliminary hearing at Manukau District Court in November, Judge Richard McIlraith ordered five ballot boxes containing votes from the electorate to be transferred from Auckland District Court, where they were being kept, to Manukau for scrutineering in the presence of Judge McIlraith, legal counsel for Hausia and Ofsoske, as well as Ofsoske himself.

Seventy-nine voting papers were subsequently identified during examination as having been cast without the rightful voter’s knowledge.

79 is a lot. That is not an isolated case where say someone received voting papers for someone who had moved address and decided to vote for them (which is of course illegal). This looks like an orchestrated campaign where ballot papers were stolen from letter boxes, filled in, and posted back.

“We say there are 3000 new votes in the Papatoetoe subdivision,” he said on Monday.

“And that is the only subdivision or local board area in the entire Auckland city that has had an increase in voting. Every other local board had a decrease in voting.”

Mitchell argued that the irregularities and unexplained surge in voting in Papatoetoe could only be explained by mass voter fraud.

This isn’t quite right. The surge in voting could be through legitimate means. If you get a team of volunteers to go around door knocking, urging people to vote, and even waiting while they fill the ballot in, and then dropping it into a ballot box for them – you can lift voting turnout. That is quite legitimate and even commendable.

But if you bypass the actual voter, and just steal the ballot paper and fill it in for them, that is illegal and corrupt.

And there are 79 proven instances of this.

Under the Local Electoral Act, a by-election could be called if enough unlawful votes were proven to have changed the outcome.

“The problem here is that the victors of the election won by about 1200 votes,” he said. “So, you would have to prove that there was a very widespread pattern of unlawful voting.”

Geddis said it was unclear whether a judge, if unable to prove whether enough unlawful votes could have changed the outcome, would let the result stand or could void the election due to public distrust in the process.

“I would hope it’s an option that’s available because it would be pretty bad, I think, to have a judicial inquiry that finds, yes, there were widespread irregularities, but the judge just has to let the results stand,” he said. “I think that would be a bad outcome.”

The 79 proven fraudulent votes are a lot less than the 1,200 margin. But here is the quandary. How many more were there? Unlike online voting, where the voter is notified that a vote has been cast on their behalf, there is no way voters know if someone voted on their behalf, if they themselves did not vote. Only if you noticed you did not receive ballot papers and cared enough to follow up, would this be discovered.

So I suspect there were more than 79 fraudulent votes. Is it 1,200? No idea. But a by-election would be the best outcome as both tickets could campaign, and do all the legitimate things around encouraging people to vote, and then see who wins.

If there is a by-election, I would suggest there be a safety mechanism where the Returning Officer sends a letter to any voter whose ballot has been received, saying it has been. This would allow the voter to know if someone voted on their behalf. In fact that could be a good safeguard for all postal voting elections.

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