Council vote turns nasty in Albert-Eden
The election in the Auckland Council’s Albert-Eden-Puketa¯papa ward has turned nasty, with City Vision lodging a formal complaint alleging that rival candidate Mark Thomas has falsified his home address.
City Vision chairman Robert Gallagher said the centre-left group lodged the complaint with the Electoral Commission after discussions with a Queen’s Counsel, stating that Thomas “falsely claimed to be living within the Albert-Eden-Puketa¯papa ward when he registered on the New Zealand electoral roll”.
Anyone convicted of making a false statement in any application, certificate or information supplied under the Electoral Act faces penalties of up to three months in jail or a fine of up to $2000. Thomas firmly rejects the claim and says he has complied with the rules.
Gallagher said that even if Citizens and Ratepayers candidate Thomas was elected and subsequently convicted, he believed the offence was not serious enough to invalidate his election.
The Herald reported last week that Thomas had moved out of his $5.7 million family home in Remuera and had been sleeping on the floor in his campaign office in Dominion Rd, which he gave as his home address for the election.
“It seems that he moved his official residence to his campaign office so that he could tell voters that he lives in the area,” Gallagher said.
“The voting booklet, which accompanies every voting paper, includes a statement from each candidate stating whether their principal place of residence is inside the ward or not.”
The Electoral Act section 72 requires voters to register at the address “that a person makes his or her home”. The Electoral Act section 74 says that a voter should have lived at their address for at least a month prior to registering to vote there.
“We think it’s a stretch of credibility for Mark Thomas to claim his home for over a month was a shop with no bathroom and which was not a legal place to reside, when there was a large house a few kilometres away where his wife and children were living,” Gallagher said.
Thomas said he was based in his office for six weeks and on August 15 moved to an Eden Terrace apartment.