Anderton referred to Police
Jim Anderton has been referred to the Police, for his letter to all voters in Wigram urging them to vote for Labour’s Megan Woods.
The Electoral Commission has ruled on a complaint from Cameron Slater that Jim Anderton is ineligible to be a promoter of a candidate advertisement, as he is a party leader. He did not register as a promoter, and someone involved in the administration of the affairs of a registered party is ineligible to be a unregistered promoter.
This could be quite a lot more serious that the normal referral for forgetting to put an authorisation statement on an advertisement. There are two reasons this is much more serious:
- Jim Anderton has done something he was not allowed to do under the law.
- This was not an obscure ad on Facebook or in a school newsletter, but a letter sent to every voter in the electorate
Sadly we will not know before the election the outcomes of any of the complaints to the Police. In what appears to be a fit of cowardice, it seems they have a policy that they will not decide on any prosecutions until after the election. This is massively wrong, and actually encourages law breaking.