How the alleged electoral fraud occured

Some fascinating details of how the alleged electoral fraud by a Labour local body candidate occurred.

Michael Field at Stuff reports:

In the High Court in Auckland today Labour Party member and Sikh leader Daljit Singh faces 20 charges of forging documents to change residential addresses showing that people from places like Timaru and Tauranga appeared to live in the Otara-Papatoetoe Local Board area.

Singh was a candidate in the first super city election in 2010.

“In a sentence, he and his associates . . . carried out a fraud in the election system to try and assist Daljit Singh,” Crown prosecutor Robin McCoubrey told the jury of 10 women and two men.

Also appearing are Gurinder Atwall, Davinder Singh, Mandeep Singh, Virender Singh, Paramjit Singh, Malkeet Singh and Harmesh Singh who face fewer forgery charges. They also pleaded not guilty.

McCoubrey said that at the time the Electoral Enrolment Centre (EEC) made it “rather easy” for people to go online and change their electoral address.

He said Daljit Singh and Atwall, who he called Singh’s “right-hand man,” used the names of Sikhs to go on to the EEC’s website.

Once there they would change the address, to the local board area where Daljit Singh was standing, and then download a declaration form which they signed and submitted.

“The vast majority of those whose addresses were changed were unaware it was happening,” McCoubrey said.

If this is what occured, it would have had two effects. The first is to allow fraudalant votes to be cast on behalf of the “moved” voters for presumably Daljit Singh.

The second is that it effectively stole a vote from those “moved” voters in that they would no longer be eligible to vote in their actual local area – and worse would not be able to vote in the parliamentary elections. They’d turn up to vote and find they are not on the local electoral roll.

McCoubrey said the EEC became suspicious when they saw unusual patterns in address changes.

They noticed a large number of voters were registered to the same address. They also found that they were coming from the same Internet Provider addresses, or same computers, and these were from Daljit Singh’s home and from Atwall.

If the allegations are correct, that was a very dumb move doing it from home.

McCoubrey gave the jury an example of six people in Timaru who had their addresses changed.

The declaration form submitted for five of them was found to have come from Daljit Singh’s computer while the sixth came from his office.

They were allegedly shifting people from Timaru!

Evidence would also be produced of text and phone calls that could be linked to the submission of address-change forms.

That will be interesting.