Fears of widespread fraud in the local elections in May were raised yesterday, according to The Times, after a judge said that the rules for postal ballots were fatally flawed. Just weeks before more than two million people are expected to vote by post in local council and mayoral elections, Richard Mawrey, QC, said that postal voting on demand was "lethal to the democratic process". He said that the current system made "wholesale electoral fraud both easy and profitable" and accused politicians of failing to act after past scandals. He urged sweeping reforms to electoral law dealing with corruption.The Electoral Commission urged the Government to heed its calls to introduce individual registration for all voters similar to the scheme in Northern Ireland for the past few years. "We have been saying since 2003 that the current system of voter registration in Great Britain is not sufficiently secure and that a system of individual voter registration is needed to provide a secure foundation for both registration and postal voting," a spokesman for the commission said yesterday.
The chief safeguard included in the Electoral Registration Act 2006 was to require people voting by post to sign a form and write their date of birth when returning their ballot paper, to be checked against the signature on their original request.
But the judge attacked the move as inadequate, saying council staff were untrained to match signatures and computers were unreliable, meaning bogus ballots still slipped through and some genuine votes were rejected.
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