Auckland Council elections: Electoral fraud complaint filed with police, claims vote papers stolen from letterboxes

Complaints have been made about alleged vote-stealing during the Auckland Council elections. Image / File

The chief electoral officer has filed a complaint of alleged electoral fraud with the police after the Auckland Council elections that ended last Saturday.

The complaint alleges “severe electoral malpractice” in Papatoetoe. The allegations include “nightly vote stealing by a team of young boys”, voters being instructed how to vote “inside the polling booths”, and other instances of voters “in places like temples and churches” being told how to vote.

The chief electoral officer, Dale Ofsoske, has confirmed to the Herald that he has received “several complaints about alleged vote stealing from letterboxes in the Papatoetoe area”.

He said he has forwarded one of them to the police and “it is now a police matter”.

The Herald has seen the complaint, and the police have been asked to comment.

Ofsoske also said the complaint will not delay the release of official results, which is scheduled for Saturday.

“The Papatoetoe ... results will not be suspended or delayed,” he said. “If there is a police investigation which may lead to a prosecution, we would be guided by any court decision regarding the results.”

The result in the Papatoetoe subdivision of the Ōtara-Papatoetoe board was unusual. While the total number of votes cast fell in almost every other local board area, it rose in Papatoetoe.

Across the city, the average fall was 6.7%. In the Ōtara subdivision, next door to Papatoetoe and with similar demographics, the vote fell by 1%.

But in the Papatoetoe subdivision, the vote grew by 7.1%.

On the local board, Papatoetoe has four seats and Ōtara three.

The voter growth in Papatoetoe was not reflected uniformly through the result for the subdivision. Candidates who had stood in 2022 and stood again this year received very similar levels of support.

But four new candidates in Papatoetoe recorded a clean-sweep victory with significantly more votes than previously seen in the area.

On the preliminary results, Kunal Bhalla, Kushma Nair, Sandeep Saini and Paramjeet Singh recorded between 5137 and 4540 votes each. In 2022, the final results for the winning candidates ranged from 3267 to 3079 votes.

That means the 2025 winners received about 50% more votes than previous winners, even though the votes of other candidates did not suffer. That 50% increase appears to have been new votes.

The Herald has asked the four candidates for comment.

The Papatoetoe subdivision, like many parts of South Auckland, has traditionally been a Labour stronghold. This year, the successful candidates came from a new ticket: the Papatoetoe-Ōtara Action Team.

Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.