An African mayoral candidate has asked to be spared jail for trying to rig an Adelaide council election, saying he only did it to “save face” because he had no change of winning.
Zimbabwean immigrant Jaison Midzi, 46, from Seacombe Gardens, maintained his innocence for a year before suddenly admitting to the electoral fraud on the day he was set to go to trial in November for providing fake ballot papers while running for Mayor in the City of Marion in 2022.
He pleaded guilty to 10 counts of dishonestly exercise a vote at an election or poll under the Local Governments Act 1999, and faced Adelaide Magistrates Court again on Wednesday, The Advertiser reported.
The court heard the Electoral Commission of South Australia (ECSA) started investigating 490 returned declaration envelopes suspected of being submitted by the same people after seeing similar handwriting patterns and a missing date of birth on a declaration form.
Midzi’s lawyer said his client should be given a good behaviour bond as he had already suffered “public humiliation”, been fired from his job as a nurse, and described the offending as “almost certain to be unsuccessful” in changing the outcome of the election.
“[Midzi] was not motivated out of a desire to change the result … but rather out of a desire, on his part, to save face or minimise the embarrassment of a low vote count in his favour in terms of the mayoral election,” he said.
But the prosecutor disputed the claim that Midzi knew he could not change the outcome, saying he ran a tough campaign and that only a custodial sentence would be appropriate.
She also told the court that Midzi shouldn’t be shown leniency due to “the fact that he didn’t do a great job” of filling out the forms, or because he was only facing 10 counts of the charge.
Midzi, a former Citizen of the Year nominee, faces a maximum penalty of one year in jail or a $5,000 fine for each charge, and will be sentenced in February.
He also ran unsuccessfully as an independent candidate in the seat of Gibson in the South Australian state election in March 2022, and as a City of Marion councillor in 2018, but was elected Chairperson of the South Australia Zimbabwe Association in the same year.
Midzi has made regular pro-diversity posts on social media, and often weighs in on Zimbabwean and African politics, writing on X: “One Africa is what we want. The borders came from your greedy Europeans.”
During the 2018 election he made a campaign video with a music group called the Diversity Music Collective, which included him dancing in front of the City of Marion council chambers and singing the lyrics “thank you all for trusting me”.
The ECSA also investigated voting scams in West Torrens, and in the City of Adelaide’s Central Ward that led to that election being declared void in April after a court found Chinese councillor Jing Li was elected as a result of “illegal practices” related to postal ballots involving foreign students. Li has not been accused of wrongdoing.
Header image: Left, Jaison Midzi during the 2022 campaign. Right, a campaign poster (Facebook).
