Scrap postal votes or elections will be fixed, says judge who warns ballot-rigging is now a 'probability' in parts of Britain



Judge Richard Marvey, who presides over electoral fraud, made warning

He said introducing 'on demand' postal voting did not boost turnout

But it has opened the electoral system to fraud on 'an industrial scale'



Open to abuse: Local election postal ballots are counted

Postal voting is ‘wide open to fraud’ and should be scrapped in its current form, a top judge warned last night.



Judge Richard Mawrey, who sits in judgment on election fraud cases, said ballot-rigging was now a ‘probability’ in some parts of Britain due to the extension of postal voting.



Mr Mawrey, a deputy high court judge, said the introduction of ‘on demand’ postal voting had failed to boost turnout. But he warned it had made Britain’s electoral system vulnerable to fraud on ‘an industrial scale’.



He told Radio 4’s File on 4 programme that in one case last year he had come across 14 different ways in which postal votes can be manipulated.



‘Postal voting on demand, however many safeguards you build into it, is wide open to fraud,’ he said.



‘It’s open to fraud on a scale that will make election rigging a possibility and indeed in some areas a probability.’



Mr Mawrey presided over a notorious 2004 ballot-rigging case in Birmingham which uncovered evidence of abuse he said would ‘disgrace a banana republic’.



Yesterday he added: ‘What has worried me about this for some time is the ease with which is it possible to commit postal vote fraud and the scale on which it can be committed.



‘In the past when you had personal voting, that is to say voting at polling stations, there was fraud but, frankly, it was minuscule. Postal voting on demand has enabled fraud to be carried out on what, in one case, I described as an industrial scale.’

In January, the Electoral Commission warned it was concerned about 16 council areas in England, including Birmingham. It said police should mount patrols at polling stations in these ‘vulnerable’ areas.

The commission has also launched a study into concerns that some south Asian communities, notably those with roots in parts of Pakistan and Bangladesh, are particularly susceptible to electoral fraud.



But Electoral Commission chairman Jenny Watson yesterday said it would not be ‘proportionate’ to end postal voting altogether.



At risk: Sixteen council areas in England ought to be patrolled by police to prevent fraud, the Electoral Commission warned

She said political parties should be forced to sign up to a new code of conduct, including a ban on activists handling postal ballot papers.

‘We are talking about the behaviour of unscrupulous campaigners who act in an improper way to put pressure on people,’ she said.



‘It is that behaviour that needs to be tackled.



‘You can’t punish voters for the behaviour of unscrupulous campaigners, and that’s what abolishing postal voting on demand would do.’



But others warned that further action may be needed to eradicate ballot-rigging.



Returning officer Ray Morgan, chief executive of Woking Borough Council, said: ‘I don’t think any election that I’ve presided over since 2006 has been totally fair and honest.’



Tory MP Andrew Stephenson said postal voting should be scrapped except in cases where voters could show they had a ‘genuine need’.



Mr Stephenson, MP for Pendle in Lancashire, said: ‘When you actually look in the UK and look at what’s going on in Pendle ...there is real fraud going on.



‘The Government should really look at this issue and really look at going back to only allowing postal votes to people who have a genuine need for a postal vote.



‘Everybody else should turn up at the polling station, like they always used to have to, in order to cast their vote.’



But Cabinet Office Minister Greg Clark said problems in a ‘small number of cases’ should not prevent the majority of law-abiding people having a postal vote.

