New Zealand Election Fraud
It seems that this election season has not gone without fraud. In New Zealand, a vote for “Bird of the Year” has been marred by fraudulent votes:
More than 1,500 fraudulent votes were cast in the early hours of Monday in the country’s annual bird election, briefly pushing the Little-Spotted Kiwi to the top of the leaderboard, organizers and environmental organization Forest & Bird announced Tuesday.
Those votes—which were discovered by the election’s official scrutineers—have since been removed. According to election spokesperson Laura Keown, the votes were cast using fake email addresses that were all traced back to the same IP address in Auckland, New Zealand’s most populous city.
It feels like writing this story was a welcome distraction from writing about the US election:
“No one has to worry about the integrity of our bird election,” she told Radio New Zealand, adding that every vote would be counted.
Asked whether Russia had been involved, she denied any “overseas interference” in the vote.
I’m sure that’s a relief to everyone involved.
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Clive Robinson • November 13, 2020 8:00 AM
@ ALL,
Yes they’ve been a rarity around here since “lockdown” many have migrated south for better climes…
But joking aside, all voting systems attract people who think that they should get more than one bite at the cherry.
An example in the UK was “Boaty McBoatface”[1] whilst it was just a joke, that took a gentle swip at the pomposity of certain types of organisation it gained legs of it’s own and when the “stiff upper lip” mob started to look perplexed and dropped hints that the name was not in keeping with the gravitas of the tradition, voting patterns changed…
In the end a compromise was reached and whilst the ship is now RRS Sir David Attenborough the very expensive leading edge autonomous submersible is called Boaty McBoatface[2]
All though the naming idea was not original (it started with an Owl[2]), the name has become used by “researchers” who now refere to “McBoatfacing” as a cultural effect.
But the point is that you often see a change in voting patterns when you start getting McBoatfaced, thud the question of “voting fraud” does arise, but is the change “Correlation or Causation” few go and check because it can be somewhat difficult.
Saying only one vote from an IP address is like saying “only one vote per home address”, it’s obviously unfair. But it has other issues such as which vote should be excepted? If you say thr first one or the last one that allows people to “game the system” as does saying they will all be invalid.
Even charging money per vote as happens with premium rate phone lines used for “talent contests” does not appear to be a limitation on “vote rigging”.
Every time I look into voting systems I realise there are so many ways to not just “rig the election” but carry out “fraudulant voting” that we need a book on the subject. But the one thought I almost always come away with is “Simple is best” because “It’s the easiest to audit”.
And at the end of the day the secret to “Free and Fair” elections is “Simplicity, Transparancy and Audit” with transparancy giving interested parties regulated oversight[3]. And importantly simplicity making the process easly understandable so transparancy and audit can work effectively.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/17/boaty-mcboatface-wins-poll-to-name-polar-research-vessel
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_McBoatface
[3] Regulated oversight is required not just as part of auditing, but also to limit intimidation of election staff who do both the vote count and any subsequent recount for auditing.