Crown wraps up Singh electoral fraud trial
3 News reports:
A wealth of evidence suggests Daljit Singh and seven supporters falsely enrolled several people to increase his chances of winning an Auckland local board election, a jury has been told.
Crown lawyer Robin McCoubrey told jurors that documentary and text evidence showed Singh and his supporters were obtaining addresses of people from well outside Auckland in the lead-up to the Otara-Papatoetoe local board elections in 2010.
Mr McCoubrey was delivering his closing address at the High Court in Auckland, eight weeks after the trial of Singh and seven supporters on charges of using false documents began.
Mr McCoubrey says names, addresses and birth details of several people in the Punjabi community were obtained.
They were then sent to the Electoral Enrolment Centre (EEC) to notify them of a change of address so they were registered as living in the Otara-Papatoetoe area, without the knowledge of the people involved.
Mr McCoubrey says several of the people he says were falsely enrolled had testified that they weren’t interested in voting in Singh’s area.
Several of the documents sent to the EEC had fingerprints of the accused on them, and text messages between the accused showed they knew what they were doing, Mr McCoubrey said.