Bird of the Year

Bird of the Year is an annual election-based competition run by Forest & Bird to elect a "Bird of the Year" in New Zealand.
It draws support from well-known personalities including politicians, artists, actors, celebrity chefs.
History.
Bird of the Year was created by the late Helen Bain who was Forest & Bird's communications manager. It launched in October 2005 as an online poll that featured in Forest & Bird's first email newsletter. Votes were collected by email and through the post. It included 76 native bird species and received a total of 900 votes.
In 2014, the competition was temporarily changed to Seabird of the Year and only seabirds were eligible.
Scandals.
In 2008, the successful campaign to elect kākāpō was accused by the takahē of accepting undeclared donations "from wealthy migratory birds living in Monaco." It was cleared by the fictional Serious Feathered Fraud Office.
In 2010, the kākāriki was accused of rigging the vote. Forest & Bird confirmed these concerns in 2011, committing to improving vote security.
In 2011, the emperor penguin was added to the competition for one year, when a juvenile bird was found on the Kapiti Coast. It had made national and international headlines after being rescued. 
In 2015, two teenagers from Auckland made over 200 fraudulent votes for the kōkako. They used their father's business account to make fake email addresses.
In 2017, the competition suffered a further voting scandal when 112 fraudulent votes were made for the white-faced heron using internet bots from an IP address in Christchurch.
In 2018, an independent scrutineer from Dragonfly Data Science was brought in to prevent further voting scandals. Despite this, a third voting scandal surfaced when 310 fraudulent votes were placed for the shag. These were traced to Australia.
In 2020, 1500 fraudulent votes were placed for the Little spotted kiwi using fake email addresses from the same IP address, briefly pushing it to the top of the leaderboard before the fraudulent votes were discovered.