VOTER FRAUD FOUND IN BIRD OF YEAR CONTEST

The voter fraud, perpetrated Monday in New Zealand, was real. And the contenders were, er, fowl.

As the citizens slept, a hacker slipped more than 1,500 fake votes into an election database, sending one flightless bird to the top.

The scandal has roiled Bird of the Year 2020, an online popularity contest among the native birds of New Zealand, and made headlines in the remote Pacific Island nation, which takes its avian biodiversity seriously.

“It’s kind of disappointing that people decide to try their little tech tricks on Bird of the Year,” Laura Keown, spokeswoman for the competition, told Radio New Zealand on Tuesday. “I’m not sure what kind of person could do it, but I like to assume that it’s somebody who just really loved native birds.”

No one has claimed responsibility, and no one is expected to.

The contest, which began Nov. 2 and ends today, is conducted through an instant-runoff system that allows voters to rank their favorite birds — just as New Zealanders do when they elect humans to office. The organizer, a New Zealand-based advocacy group called Forest & Bird, has said the contest is designed to raise awareness about the plight of the country’s more than 200 species of native birds, many of which are threatened or at risk of extinction.

As the voting commenced, Yvan Richard, a data scientist at Dragonfly, a consultancy in New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, that had volunteered to monitor the vote, spotted something suspicious.

He discovered that someone had slipped a huge amount of votes in favor of the kiwi pukupuku, or little spotted kiwi. It is one of five species of kiwi bird, New Zealand’s national icon. It is flightless — a common avian trait in a country without native, land-based mammalian predators.

Forest & Bird said in a statement Tuesday that while “illegitimate” ballots had briefly pushed the pukupuku into the lead, they were removed within a few hours.

The kiwi pukupuku scandal is not the first case of bird-related voter fraud in New Zealand.

In 2015, two 15-year-old girls created fake email addresses and used them to cast fraudulent votes for the kokako, which has a “minimalist, operatic five-note song.”

And in 2017, the Dragonfly consultancy spotted a suspicious midnight spike in votes for the matuku moana, or white-faced heron.