The New Zealand police advised in August that it has closed its ten-month investigation into allegations of electoral fraud linked to the 2025 Ōtara-Papatoetoe Local Board election. After a ‘thorough review’, the police reported that there was simply insufficient evidence to proceed further (i.e. to lay charges). Fraud was found by District Court Judge McIlwraith in December 2025, and his ruling to void the Papatoetoe subdivision election was upheld in a subsequent judicial review.
So there remains no accountability for the illegal behaviour that occurred. It is not clear who stole the (many) voting papers, filled them in and submitted them, and we are certainly not making any specific allegations. But there are obvious system weaknesses that enabled and emboldened this behaviour, including the reliance on postal voting, weaknesses in legislation, poor oversight and minimal reporting mechanisms. We still call for a public inquiry into the risks to, and options for protection of, our local vote.
Auckland Council has taken the threat seriously
Auckland Council has taken the integrity threat seriously and is bringing back in-person voting for the 2028 Auckland local elections, becoming the first council in New Zealand to use voting booths since 1992. They concluded from their consultation that “trust, visibility and convenience are the key considerations when it comes to local elections” and that “booth voting was identified as the strongest option for supporting electoral integrity and public confidence”.
Auckland City will now move to the model currently in use for the parliamentary elections - advance voting and voting on election day. This will cost at least twice as much as postal voting, so they are trying to find savings.
Auckland Council is also pressing for longer-term electoral reform, including “greater involvement from the Electoral Commission and future consideration of online voting, should legislative settings permit.” It’s a solid commitment to integrity by the Council of our largest city.
Parliamentary discussion is lacklustre
Meanwhile, parliamentary discussion on this is lacklustre. In August 2026 the Justice Committee published the report Inquiry into the 2025 Local Elections (this is a statutory requirement that follows all national and local body elections). The committee briefly noted the August 2026 claims of stolen and refilled voting papers and the court decisions, but has made no specific recommendations around voter fraud risks.
The Justice Committee did conclude that postal voting is "no longer fit for purpose”, but it made no recommendations for legislative change. Its recommendation (10) around proactive reporting by private election providers on statistical anomalies in voting trends uses ‘encourage’ and ‘consider asking’ – about as weak as you can get.
There are no considerations of offences, penalties, enforcement, or how alleged electoral fraud should be handled, no examination of how the fraud actually worked, or how it could be detected sooner. This is the sort of consideration that a proper public inquiry would address.
The Committee report does urge the government to "reach a decision" on whether the Commission runs local elections, and still endorses its 2023 general election recommendation that the Commission be funded to do this. In fact every Justice Committee since 2010 has recommended some form of centralisation. But the Committee made no recommendation to change the Electoral Act which currently inhibits the Commission from contracting with Councils to run their elections.
Vapid response by the Minister for Local Government
There has been a similar vapid response by the Minister for Local Government, who advised the LGNZ Electoral Reform Working Group in March 2026 that he accepted that the Electoral Commission is the obvious candidate for running local elections, but that he would not progress centralisation at that time because of “the wider local government reform”.
Special Votes
The Justice Committee inquiry also looked at the treatment of special votes, 30% of which (overall) were rejected in the 2025 national election, with huge variation across the country in that level of rejection (e.g. 40.5% of special votes were rejected in Kaipara, 17% were rejected in Wellington).
The committee made a good recommendation to Councils to remove the occupation requirement on forms (general elections have already dropped it) and another to simplify the special vote process generally.
But the Committee’s focus around special votes was how to make special votes easier. They did not discuss how loosening the rules interacts with fraud risk, despite the court cases including claims about irregular special and duplicate votes.
TINZ’s observation to the committee that no central agency reviews trends in disallowed votes was left unaddressed by the Committee.
One could make a case that this ‘thumbs on foreheads’ behaviour towards local body election integrity is due to a desire to uphold local government autonomy over representation processes. But New Zealand governments consistently use levers on councils. Labour-led governments have tended to impose national environmental and housing standards, whilst National-led governments have tended to narrow what councils are for and limit how much they can spend. Both have overridden councils on structure and housing.
The issue of local government election integrity is too important to be avoided. There is no effective accountability mechanism, and that is one of the main problems for the central government to solve.
