Voting packs in stolen mail

Several voting packs were stolen from the mail.

Tauranga City Council's electoral officer Warwick Lampp is frustrated it took nearly a week before he found out about the theft of two New Zealand Post mail bags that included 290 voting packs.

The motivation for the theft was not electoral fraud because there had been no spike of voting papers from the area of the theft in Welcome Bay.

The theft was reported at a time when it looked like the rate of returns for voting appeared to be lagging behind the 2010 and 2007 elections.

Only 11.2 per cent rate of voting papers for the Tauranga City Council election had been returned for the first nine days of the election period which ends on October 12. This was 3 per cent behind 2010 and 7 per cent behind 2007.

Mr Lampp was not concerned by the trend, saying it depended on the days of the week and mail deliveries. "New Zealand Post is not consistent." He guessed that the America's Cup would have impacted on voting patterns last week and he was confident that voting was on track to end up about the same as 2010's 44 per cent return.

Instead his focus this week had been on sorting out the problems created by the theft of two mail bags containing about 400 items of mail which had been sorted for delivery to 195 households in nine Welcome Bay streets.

Mr Lampp said that NZ Post wrote to all affected households on September 27, four days after the September 23 theft, but he did not find out until Monday, September 30.

Asked why it took so long for him to find out, he responded "good question, I have no idea. They [NZ Post] did not have an answer. The moment I found out the extent of the problem on Monday, I took action."

Because some of the voters in the nine streets had already received their voting packs, he had to identify all the registered voters, see how many had returned their papers, and then send out new packs to the rest.

He first had to double check that the 20 voting packs already returned had been filled in by the right people and not the thief.

The Bay of Plenty Times put it to NZ Post that the two mail bags had been stolen from the secure location used by the postie because there was too much mail to be delivered in one run.

A spokesman for NZ Post declined to comment on the theft, saying it was not policy to discuss security arrangements in a public forum. "It is counter-productive to get that."

He said they were working with police and he took the lead from police as to what could be released to help with the investigation. Comment could not be obtained from Tauranga police yesterday.

Asked why it took so long to contact Mr Lampp, he said staff had followed the standard procedure when a mail theft occurred which was to alert police and householders as quickly as possible. "We will be reviewing processes in light of the fact the content of the mail included electoral packs."