Auckland Council drops postal voting after Papatoetoe fraud, tells staff to halve the cost

Auckland Council's governing body voted on Tuesday to stop using postal voting and move to in-person booth voting for future local elections. RNZ reports that the change applies from the 2028 local elections.

Booth voting could cost up to $40 million, against $16m for postal voting, the NZ Herald reports.

Councillors balked at that. An amendment tells staff to bring the cost of a 10-day booth voting process down to $20m and report back to the council in December. It passed 13 votes to three, the Herald reported. Mayor Wayne Brown and councillors Andy Baker and Greg Sayers voted against.

The decision follows the 2025 Papatoetoe subdivision election, where a judge voided the result and ordered a re-election. The Herald reports that councillors also raised recent claims of vote rigging in the Manurewa election.

Apulu Reece Autagavaia, chairman of the Ōtara-Papatoetoe Local Board, said irregularities in the Papatoetoe vote had "permeated and infected" the result, the Herald reported. "The integrity of the system and ensuring people have confidence in the system – that's the price of democracy," he said.

Brown argued the cost was too big for the problem. He said only one elected member had lost their seat. "We're talking about possibly spending 2% of our rates just to solve a couple of postal things," he said. He also said the $20m target would come to $10 for every "man, woman and child" in Auckland, and warned that ratepayers would find that hard to accept.

Baker called the change "gambling" with ratepayers' money. "We are taking at least a $9m punt on a change in public behaviour," he said.

The majority argued that restoring trust was worth the money. Councillor Richard Hills said: "I don't want to see pictures ever again of people holding hundreds of ballot papers in their hand." He suggested a targeted rate to cover the extra cost, though the council has not voted on it. Councillor Julie Fairey said greater public confidence was "worth the cost". Councillor Lotu Fuli called the extra spending "eye-watering" but said keeping the current system would amount to "rewarding the fraudsters and wrongdoers".

Local Government New Zealand wants the question settled nationally rather than council by council. Its chair, Fran Wilde, said there were "real and urgent problems" with postal voting. She called on the Government to deliver a nationwide in-person voting system run and promoted by the Electoral Commission, and asked all parties to make that a priority in the next term of Parliament.

Wilde said councils can technically switch to booths on their own, as Auckland has done. But she said it would be much cheaper, and would lift turnout, if the Electoral Commission ran local elections centrally.