Candidates distance themselves from fraudulent election

2026-03-22 - 16:04

Pity the poor residents of Papatoetoe. While most of us struggled to get interested in last October’s local body elections (just 39 percent of New Zealanders voted) the south Auckland subdivision is in the middle of doing the whole thing all over again. After a District Court challenge to the result, in which four Indian members of the Papatoetoe-Ōtara Action Team won by considerable margins, a judge ruled there was enough evidence of fraud in postal ballots to suggest there could have been a material impact on the overall election. The Action Team has solid reasons for the increase in enrolments and voter turnout, but it didn’t turn up to the court to put those forward. So the Indian community’s decision to get more involved in democracy, which started as a spectacular and surprising success, has come unstuck. Today on The Detail we look at the reasons behind the original election result and higher-than-average voter turnout; talk to a law expert about how that result was overturned; and ask if postal voting has had its day. A District Court judge said the Action Team candidates involved shouldn’t feel impugned – a High Court judge reinforced that – but the candidates say it’s hard not to feel tainted by the actions of whoever stole voting papers from letter boxes and filled them out in their favour. “They’ve told us that it’s very challenging,” says Blessen Tom, a reporter with RNZ’s Asia-Pacific team. “Especially now that they’ve decided they’re going to stand again, because there is no other way. They have to prove that their victory was fair and square. “But it is challenging to go out and campaign again and convince people; and it is out in the public, people know that fraud happened and many of them within the community are blaming each other. “The community was dragged along [in the fallout] which is the very sad part. People talk in south Auckland and it became this weird ‘Indian community versus the other community’ issue in south Auckland which is very sad ... because they’re all immigrants, we’re all immigrants, and the communities were living peacefully without any problems for so long. “Then you have this rhetoric of, you know, the migrant people from India coming in and doing fraud.” Tom says the community feels there’s an element of racism involved, and the Action Team is faced with the task of convincing people it wasn’t them. They weren’t even a party to the District Court proceedings, and say that’s why they didn’t turn up to present reasons behind their success, including intensive campaigning and intensive population growth. “They didn’t have to show up,” says Otago University law professor Andrew Geddis, “because they weren’t directly being challenged”. “The allegation wasn’t that they individually had done anything wrong, rather the claim was that the overall vote was tainted by alleged double-voting and voting by people who weren’t entitled to vote, etcetera. The Action Team claim that they weren’t given enough details about what the court case was going to involve, so they didn’t think they needed to be there. “I think that’s probably a bit of a stretch – it was pretty obvious that their election was being challenged. It was obvious that it was being challenged on the basis that voting processes had taken place that shouldn’t have. And with hindsight it was a bad tactical error for them not to be there in the court to provide their own explanation for why it was that they were so successful. “By not providing that counter-narrative, it in essence allowed the petitioners to basically tell the story. A story that in the end the judge accepted.” Check out how to listen to and follow The Detail here. You can also stay up-to-date by liking us on Facebook or following us on Twitter.