Hunua ‘dodge’ alleged

Press, 28 May 1979, Page 6

Hunua ‘dodge’ alleged

PA Dunedin The Prime Minister (Mr Muldoon) continued his attack on the role of the Labour Party in the Hunua election when he addressed the Otago-Southland division of the National Party at Dunedin on Saturday.

Urging National Party people to “do their homework” before the next election, Mr Muldoon said it was apparent that there were some clever people in the Labour Party who were not “terribly scrupulous” when it came to an interpretation of the electoral law.

“The way in which people have worked out a means of

increasing the vote a bit — it was the difference between winning and losing in Hunua,” he said.

It was a “dodge” to look at the electoral roll and see the name of a National Party committee member ?nd go along to a polling booth in another part of the electorate and vote in his name.

“What happens is that he has apparently voted twice and his real vote is disallowed. Lyttelton tells me that that happened there,” Mr Muldoon said. “It is not too difficult to look in the papers and see someone who died in the electorate and then simply

go along and vote in that name,” he said. “Apparently that happened in Hunua because there were votes in the names of dead persons in Hunua.” If the Government could not assume that people were going to be honest at election time “we are going to have to build in more safeguards, and that will not be easy,” iMr Muldoon said.

The judges who heard the Hunua petition had suggested that identity cards would be the only answer.

“What that means for the public to accept is a very big hurdle indeed,” Mr Muldoon said.