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

Electoral fraud has been alleged in the Papatoetoe vote in the Auckland Council election.

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 from Election Services, 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 confirmed they are investigating.

“Police can confirm we have received reports in relation to allegations of electoral fraud linked to the current Council elections in Papatoetoe,” said a spokesperson. “At this stage, Police enquiries are in the very early stages and remain ongoing.”

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. With the final votes now declared, it’s been confirmed that the total number of votes cast fell in almost every other local board area. But it rose in Papatoetoe.

In the south Auckland areas near Papatoetoe, the turnout fell by one or two percentage points, compared with the 2022 election, to between 21% and 25%. But in the Papatoetoe subdivision, the vote grew by 7.5 percentage points, from 24.1% to 31.6%.

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.

This story has been updated with comment from the police and inclusion of data from the final election results.

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.