David Farrar: Postal voting is very insecure

The Spinoff reports:

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.

I have no idea if there was fraud in that election, but I will say that postal voting is very very insecure, and much more open to fraud than other methods – including Internet voting.

You can indeed take hundreds or even thousands of postal voting papers from letterboxes, open them, fill them in, send them to the Returning Officer, and there are no checks. The person whose ballot papers they are doesn’t get notified that a vote has been cast on their behalf. It is only if they check, does the fraud get detected.

So again I have no idea what happened in that board election, but postal voting fraud is very easy to do, quite hard to detect and even harder to prove who is responsible. If you do detect multiple votes all for the same candidate, that is not enough to prove it is them behind it. You would need physical proof such as fingerprints or DNA on voting papers, handwriting analysis (hard just for ticks) or CCTV footage of someone grabbing voting papers from letterboxes or putting large numbers into a NZ Post letterbox.

One easy anti fraud measure would be to have the Returning Officer e-mail a resident once their voting paper has been received. Most people have provided an e-mail address to the Electoral Commission, and a simple law change could allow it to be used to notify people their vote has been received. This would allow people early on to alert the Returning Officer that someone has voted on their behalf.

David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders