Rocking the boat

I discovered a dismal sequel to my last piece. Enjoy.

We all have our quirks, and here’s one of mine: when I’m in a shitty, I make a spreadsheet. I figure out the structure, label the columns, and begin pouring my feminist rage into the cells. That’s how I’ve been spending my weekend: working through an enormous official information request, document after document, summarising each one into a spreadsheet row.

What the hell am I up to, exactly? We’ll come to that – but first, let’s go back a few steps.

A couple of weeks back, doing research for the book I’m writing, I stumbled on what I thought was a gap in the checks and balances of our electoral system. I was cautious about my discovery, not wanting to assume wrongdoing or bad faith, but I couldn’t unsee what I’d seen, and what I’d seen had me pretty worried. I spoke up.

My previous piece captures the full annoyingness of my experience, and is worth a look if you’re up for being fully annoyed. Otherwise, there’s a potted history in the section below. Readers who remember can skip this next bit and come back at the ‘anyhoo’.

If you can bear two to three minutes of suffering, here’s the background:

• During the 2025 local government election, Graham Bloxham worked on the campaign of then-mayor of Upper Hutt, Wayne Guppy.
• Bloxham targeted people willy-nilly, including Guppy’s rivals. Guppy was made aware of this more than once.
• When the media got interested, Guppy told them he wasn’t working with Bloxham – despite evidence suggesting otherwise, including the two of them filming themselves in a campaign video they made in Guppy’s car. Bloxham himself admitted the relationship to The Post.

I was irked by the campaign behaviour, then bemused when Bloxham’s contributions to Guppy’s campaign didn’t appear on Guppy’s electoral return. Returns have to contain:

• Donations, including good and services from a single donor that have a value of more than $1500.
• Expenses, including donated materials that are worth more than $200.
• Bloxham provides social media services, albeit crap ones, for a living, so any argument his services don’t have market value is hard to sustain – especially since Guppy had purchased those very services from Bloxham during the previous election.

Failure to declare donations and expenses is an offence, but ringing the police seemed daft, so I talked to the electoral officer, who I call The Officer. Critically, local government electoral officers usually work for private sector businesses, with little accountability or transparency – they’re not subject to official information requests, the Ombudsman or the Electoral Commission. They rely for their livelihood on contracts with councils, creating murky incentives when they’re faced with complaints about elected officials they work with. They may not want to rock the boat.  

I sent The Officer my evidence that Bloxham had donated services to Guppy’s campaign: a ‘brichure’ he’d designed, and two campaign videos, one of which was Guppy and Bloxham in the car. Both campaign videos had been posted to Guppy’s Facebook page.

And I was nonplussed by The Officer’s response. As he told me, he’d already fielded a similar question. He’d answered that person the same as he answered me: he’d rung Guppy, and Guppy had assured him he never engaged Bloxham for any services Bloxham had provided. That meant they didn’t count as donations or expenses and didn’t have to be declared.

I had two problems:

• What kind of investigation involves considering only the candidate’s account, and not evidence that’s in obvious tension with it?
• Was The Officer actually applying the law? The Local Electoral Act 2001 doesn’t say donated services only count if the candidate engages a donor to supply them – otherwise, it’d be an easy rort. Bloxham had donated services. Guppy had received and used them. That was the issue I was raising.

Despite a lot of back and forth, The Officer wouldn’t budge – even though I told him I’m a writer planning to publish and gave him umpteen opportunities to correct anything I’d gotten wrong. He just rung Guppy again, got the same story, and decided there was no case to answer. If I wanted to do something about it, I’d need to go to police myself.

As The Officer put it, in language that felt a bit familiar:

Ultimately its not my call as to whether an offence has occurred … but my view is that there is insufficient evidence to prove that Wayne engaged Mr Bloxham. Yes, he may well have discussed this with him, but Wayne advises that he chose not to contract him on his campaign, and therefore there is no expense nor donation to declare.  

That was that.

Anyhoo.

After I published my previous post, setting out the story above, people contacted me. One of them had a deeply troubling story of their own. Yes, I’d spotted a gap in the checks and balances of our electoral system – but, of course, I was far from the first to notice.

This other story is also bonkers, and if it wasn’t for a guy called Vi Hausia and the absolute troopers at The Spinoff, we might never have found out about it. Here goes.

In October last year, as the results of the local government elections were announced, it became clear something bloody weird had happened in Papatoetoe.

The first clue was turnout. Everywhere else in Auckland, the vote had tanked. Papatoetoe had somehow bucked the trend, with the turnout for the local board race up 7.5%.

The second clue was the result. A new ticket, the Papatoetoe-Ōtara Action Team, had swept all four of Papatoetoe’s seats on the local board. These candidates were way out in front of their rivals, including Vi, who’d placed fifth.

What was going on?

An electoral officer has a duty under the law to report to police any complaints they receive about offences. And people had complained a bunch of times to the electoral officer for Papatoetoe. They believed the Papatoetoe-Ōtara Action Team had been telling folks how to vote and giving them food – serious concerns, because the Local Electoral Act 2001 says its an offence to interfere with or influence voters, or to ‘treat’ them (give voters food, drink, entertainment or anything else to influence their voting behaviour).

During the campaign, those complaints to the electoral officer went no further – except for one. On 16 October, two days before the results were due, the electoral officer confirmed this particular complaint had gone to police. He assured the public the complaint wouldn’t delay the results. "Everything carries on and proceeds as normal," he said, as if it were no big deal.

Reader: it was a very big deal. Papatoetoe had fallen victim to maybe the worst electoral fraud Aotearoa has seen – and a batshit fraud at that.  

During the campaign, teams of kids had been roaming the streets of Papatoetoe, pinching voting papers out of letterboxes. Those papers were then used by shadowy others to cast votes. After the polls closed, 79 irregular votes were counted, 53 looking downright dodgy. That 53 had been discovered in a strange sort of way. Voters who’d never received their papers had turned up in person to cast special votes, only to be told they’d already voted. It was clear something was fishy.

Now the police were involved, investigating potential offences. But that’s far from the end of the story. The police look into offences – but they don’t get to decide whether an election result is valid. That’s the job of the courts. Someone has to petition the courts to get them involved. And that’s where Vi Hausia stepped up. For excruciating weeks, involving hundreds of hours of mahi, he compiled evidence off his own bat, even engaging his own lawyer.

In December 2025, the court case began. Vi and his lawyer were on one side. On the other side were the electoral officer and his lawyers, opposing the petition. And the electoral officer’s argument? The votes were out only by a wee bit: just 79 of them. That wasn’t enough to affect the election result, which should be upheld. Carry on, proceed as normal.

Maybe you can see why this argument is bad. The dodgy votes, 53 of them, only represent the number of times the fraudsters got caught, by folks who realised someone else had voted with their papers. What about all the other stolen voting papers – the ones no one realised had gone missing? Were there dozens of them? Hundreds? How could anybody know?

Ultimately, this whole fiasco cost the everyday person. Essentially, the electoral officer argued to maintain a shonky result – something that seems completely ass backwards – and the public paid for the court process. When the court agreed with Vi, finding that widespread voter fraud had ‘infected’ the original vote, the ratepayer stumped up for a byelection.

The person who contacted me with this story believes there are candidates around the country who are afraid to get their electoral officer offside. It’s not just that electoral officers from private businesses have murky incentives – they rely on contracts with councils, so handling complaints, especially about people they know, puts them in a tricky position. It’s that there’s no one watching to make sure electoral officers treat all complaints even-handedly. You can see why candidates may not want to rock the boat.

Here's what seems bizarre to me: the Papatoetoe election result could have gone unchallenged, even though everyone knew about the fraud. The system didn’t do squat – and arguably, it couldn’t. Things came down to the work of one guy, Vi Hausia, who said, “My greatest worry was that if I said nothing, nothing would have happened."

In a single silver lining, Vi swept the byelection, taking first place. The same electoral officer, from the same private business, presided, under the same old system. Carry on, proceed as normal.

More than anyone else, I wish we were done. We’re not. Sorry.

My official information request – the one I made my spreadsheet for – was to Upper Hutt City Council. When the response arrived, I was surprised at the size of it: dozens and dozens of documents. The very first of the documents raised my eyebrows.

Everyone, and I do mean everyone, thought Bloxham was running Guppy’s social media for his election campaign last year. The media questioned them both about it. Facebook commenters just plain called it. Still, that’s a hard kind of claim to back up – especially when the candidate himself denies it.

The first document in the official information request was from August last year.

On 12 August 2025, Bloxham contacted a council staffer. He’d revived an old email conversation from the previous election, in which he and Guppy had planned Guppy’s campaign – something that shouldn’t have been done using council resources.

Now, on 12 August 2025, Bloxham asked:

Hi [redacted] Can you please send the log in & passwords for Wayne's social media accounts.

Later that day, the staffer replied:

No I can’t do that. I can add the person to manage it so please let me know who that is and I’ll give them permission to his facebook. That’s what we did last time.

Bloxham replied by sending a picture of his own Facebook profile, so the staffer knew who to add.

The next day, the staffer confirmed:

Hi Graham

I’ve added you in.

I want to say absolutely and emphatically: this is not the staffer’s fault, and I’m not criticising them. Anyone might’ve had done the same thing in the same position – a position nobody should be placed in.

But why does this exchange matter?

It’s not just that it’s hard to reconcile with Guppy’s version of events: that Bloxham was in no way involved in his campaign, and that Guppy handled his own social media. We’re back to donations and expenses.

The Officer’s argument – that Guppy didn’t need to declare Bloxham’s services, because he hadn’t engaged him – was easy to refute. But there was still a grey area. To have to be declared, services need to hit a value threshold: $1,500 for total donations, $200 for expenses.

I’d given The Officer evidence of three services: two campaign videos and a ‘brichure’. It was a line call whether these things hit the money value threshold, but I believed the question should be asked.

I didn’t count the money value of Bloxham managing Guppy’s social media, including all the other posts and home-made videos. This changes the money calculation and makes my question only more pressing. I’ve contacted The Officer again, but I’m not optimistic.

What’s the moral of this story? I’m not comparing Upper Hutt to the Papatoetoe fiasco: of course not. All I’m saying is that, like Papatoetoe, something went down. Everyone knew, but nothing happened. Nothing happens still.

The thing that irks me most isn’t rule breaking. It’s more to do with rule keeping. Allow me to explain.

Running for local government is notoriously hard. There’s the time. There’s the cost. Increasingly, there’s the harassment – especially if you’re a woman, Māori, or rainbow. Succeed, and things may get even worse: you’re still harassed, but maybe now by your own colleagues. And for a diligent councillor who puts in the time, the pay is often a pittance. We want good people to lead our communities, yet our system does everything it can to discourage them.  

Still, good people persist. They do their best to stick to the complex rules: the wording of their candidates’ statements, the font size on their billboards, where they can hand out their pamphlets. They agonise over their mistakes. It’s a burden only they bear. The less conscientious take the mickey.

Graham Bloxham sends images of the grim reaper to local government politicians. He targets everyday people too – even ones who’ve never had a single thing to do with him. People are scared. I know this because they tell me. Some will go on record. Others won’t, and they have good reason. But what this means is that, just like the votes in Papatoetoe, we’ll never know the extent of the problem.

Somehow, harassment and politics have become synonymous: something we’re told we must accept. Our strange local government system, with its feeble checks and balances, discourages people from rocking the boat. And you can’t blame them.

Rocking the boat doesn’t fix a system problem. We need to turn the tide.