Whoever thought up the idea of rigging the Supercity electoral rolls with dozens of names linked to two residential addresses in Papatoetoe – either for willful fraud or to discredit electoral rivals – it must go down as one of the most childishly ham handed acts.
It is amazing that the perpetrators assumed that such bluff could be pulled off at all in this country where electoral and other records are all computerised and therefore such brazen and poorly thought out frauds are easily detectable.
It took hardly any time for the authorities to determine that two small homes in the Papatoetoe area had dozens of Indian sounding names – mostly Singh – registered as voters. Many of these people obviously did not reside in the electoral area and certainly not in the two small homes cited – if not for anything else, for the sheer physical implausibility.
What were the perpetrators thinking? Such bluff is a far cry from the ballot box stuffing, booth capturing, candidate kidnapping and voter intimidation that is not uncommon in the more dismally run states in India.
Having detected the attempted fraud early, the falsely enrolled names were deleted from the rolls by the authorities without delay and before the ballot papers were posted last week.
Meanwhile, none of the four candidates of Indian origin contesting in the area have claimed knowledge of who was responsible except blaming the other for a “frame-up” and offering all sorts of theories of how this might have come to pass.
At the time of writing, the NZ Police are investigating who is responsible. Reports said over 40 detectives were involved in the enquiries into the fraud, which constitutes a gross violation of electoral law. Their search has now spread to Tauranga and Hamilton. It is only a question of time before they zero in on the perpetrators.
This development comes at a time when India’s image continues to receive a battering on account of the shameful developments in New Delhi in the run up to the Commonwealth Games. The words ‘corruption’ and ‘incompetence’ have been used to describe everything related to the Games in the past few weeks.
Those same words will be echoed here in New Zealand as revelations in the Papatoetoe events are reported in the news media in the coming weeks as police investigations progress. Unfortunately, those very words are bound to be associated with people of Indian origin – since clearly it is these who are involved in these developments, given the names in the rigged rolls.
The right thinking larger community must co-operate with the authorities in every possible way and try to mitigate the effects of the natural human tendency to paint birds of a feather with the same brush.