Alleged voter fraud in Papatoetoe. A candidate disrupting the voting in Onehunga library. Whatever is going on in Kaipara. These have been the most bizarre local elections in living memory.
Sarah* was queuing to vote at Onehunga library in Auckland when she heard a commotion. A woman had walked up to the election workers to ask why they were still letting people cast their ballots. It was around 12.05pm on election day, Saturday October 11, five minutes after standard voting had closed. The workers explained that Sarah and the others were there to cast special votes, which can be processed late so long as the people making them were in line before the midday deadline. The woman didn’t seem to accept that justification, despite the fact it was clearly advertised on Auckland Council’s website. She went to the back of the room and took a photo. When some of the voters asked her to stop taking pictures of them, a confrontation broke out. The woman reassured them about her intentions. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m a candidate.”
The vote disruptor was Debbie Burrows. She stood for the C&R ticket, winning the second-largest share of the vote in the Maungakiekie subdivision of the Maungakiekie-Tāmaki Local Board. But her success is under a cloud thanks to her actions on October 11. Several protests have been lodged with electoral officer Dale Ofsoske over the incident, which the complainants feel amounts to a breach of Local Electoral Act provisions forbidding people from interfering with or influencing voters on election day. Ofsoske says he’s passed those complaints on to police, who have confirmed they’re in the early stages of an investigation.
Burrows’ run-in by the non-fiction section is just one of a surprisingly large number of weird, troubling, and, in some cases, potentially criminal local election incidents around Auckland and southern Northland. Over in Papatoetoe in the south of the city, police are investigating alleged election fraud after a surprise result that saw every member of a new political ticket elected in a landslide. The vote counts in the suburb stand out. Whereas turnout slumped almost everywhere else in the city, including next door Ōtara, in Papatoetoe, it rose by 7%. Incumbent board members received roughly the same number of votes that saw them elected comfortably in 2022. But they were beaten soundly by all four members of the Papatoetoe-Otara Action Team, who were all voted onto the board by 1,000-plus vote margins over their nearest rivals.
It’s possible the team simply ran the best local campaign in recent memory. Their opponents don’t think so though. They’re making a range of allegations, including that voting papers were stolen from people’s letterboxes. Labour candidates have obtained signed statements from voters who say they never received their papers, but were still recorded as having voted. Complaints have also been lodged over people allegedly being instructed on how to vote inside polling booths and at a Sikh temple. Police again say their investigation is in its “very early” stages.
In both cases, the candidates involved are denying they did anything wrong. Burrows says she goes to the library “every election” to check the ballot box isn’t visible after midday. She didn’t know people were allowed to cast special votes after that point. “Genuinely, at that time, I believed that wasn’t due process,” she says. “Hand on heart, I made that mistake. I didn’t know.” But why go to all that trouble? Could it have something to do with the fact that special votes generally favour C&R’s left-wing rivals? “That didn’t even cross my mind,” Burrows says.
The Papatoetoe-Otara Action Team is also denying wrongdoing and welcoming a police investigation. Its campaign manager, Rajesh Goyal, has told RNZ the team’s dominant victory could be attributable to vigorous campaigning and more Indians and Indo-Fijians moving to Papatoetoe in recent years. “After the [official] inquiry, it will be clear,” Goyal says.
The situation is similarly murky over in Papakura, where a council candidate is alleging that a person connected to his election rivals set up fake Facebook pages to harass him and other politicians. Manurewa local board member Joseph Allan has laid a code-of-conduct complaint over what he says is a two-and-a-half year “sustained attack” by a man he claims was running a pair of sock puppet Facebook accounts that alternated between attacking him and his allies, and praising a rival candidate. When the Herald’s Michael Morrah put those accusations to the man, he didn’t directly deny them, but implied he didn’t have access to the accounts.
All this is before you even talk about the weirdness in Kaipara, where outgoing mayor Craig Jepson called an emergency council meeting to allege voting irregularities after progress votes showed his anointed successor, Jonathan Larsen, had just a five-vote lead over iwi leader Snow Tane on election day. At the time, it seemed Larsen would be overtaken on the specials. But the final count showed him winning by 21 votes. It’s unclear whether Jepson will continue to crusade against an alleged assault on democracy now his preferred candidate has triumphed.
Whatever Jepson decides, the 2025 local elections will go down as a huge turd in the toilet bowl of democracy. In Auckland, nearly half of all special votes were scrapped, in a final ignominious capstone to an election where turnout came in at under 30% for the first time in the super city era. Things weren’t much better in non-Auckland, with nationwide turnout topping out at 39.4%.
But what these elections have lacked in actual votes, they’ve made up for in scandals. Ofsoske has been handling voting in Auckland and its surrounding areas with his company Election Services since the 80s. He took just 19 minutes to deliberate after being asked whether this was the most weird and eventful election season he’d ever been involved with. “Yes, in 40 years running elections,” he emailed back, adding a red-cheeked smiley face emoji. The 2025 local elections may have been a national embarrassment, but you can’t say they weren’t memorable.
