Yeah, just had an experience with this during our local body elections here in NZ. A polynesian politician put pictures of his face and his name up all around my town, which is largely polynesian itself. That's it. A brown face and a polynesian name. He also got his volunteers to call every person on the electoral roll with a polynesian last name to speak to them in their native languages and tell them to vote for him. In the end he won the election, even though I'd say a good majority of the people who voted for him couldn't name a single policy of his. Pathetic. People, especially in this case with polynesian people, will just vote for a familiar face, while having no idea of what the candidate would push for once they were in.
I think, along the same sort of lines as Brother H was saying, there needs to be some sort of criteria to make sure people are making informed decisions instead of just blindly giving their vote to someone just because they look like a familiar face. So many stupid people out there.