Voter fraud could determine the outcome of the general election as evidence emerges of massive postal vote rigging.
Police have launched 50 criminal inquiries nationwide amid widespread cases of electoral rolls being packed with ‘bogus’ voters.
Officials report a flood of postal vote applications in marginal seats. With the outcome of the closest election in a generation hanging in the balance, a few thousand ‘stolen’ votes there could determine who wins the keys to Downing Street.
'Stolen': There has been a recent flood of postal vote applications in marginal seats, officials say
Anti-sleaze campaigner Martin Bell said: ‘There is actually a possibility that the result of the election could be decided by electoral fraud. That’s pretty grim.
‘We are facing a situation where we can no longer trust the integrity of our electoral system. It was a huge mistake to extend the postal vote. It opened up our system to all kinds of frauds.’
Out of a total estimated electorate of 46million, 7million have registered for postal votes.
The Metropolitan Police are examining 28 claims of major abuses across 12 boroughs - with four separate investigations in Tower Hamlets, East London.
Labour supporters stand accused of packing the electoral roll at the last minute with relatives living overseas or simply inventing phantom voters.
Officials in Tower Hamlets received 5,166 new registrations just before the April 20 deadline, and there has been no time to check them all.
In Bethnal Green, it is feared the electoral register has been deliberately stacked with fictitious names.
Yesterday the Mail visited one four-bedroom flat in the area where 18 men are apparently claiming a vote, all of whom registered within the past month.
The students living there were baffled by many of the names said to be residing with them. Another resident was surprised to learn that eight complete strangers were also registered as living in the small flat she shares with her partner.
Other addresses investigated by the Mail were linked to the Labour Party.
At a property in Rainhill Way, Bethnal Green, where Labour Party council election candidate Khales Uddin Ahmed lives with his family, seven adults have suddenly joined the electoral roll.
A few streets away, where Labour councillor Shiria Khatun is seeking re-election, her household has been boosted by three new voter registrations at her small flat within the past few weeks.
Her husband angrily slammed the door when questions were asked yesterday.
Campaign stop: Gordon Brown meets four-month-old twins Grace and Sophie Rose Lund-Conlon in Ipswich. Opinion polls indicated Britain remained on course for a parliament with no outright majority
The Mail’s Richard Kay has learned that for the first time ever the Commonwealth is dispatching a group of election monitors – more used to supervising banana republics – to scrutinise the results on Thursday.
Opposition parties fear a concerted effort is being made to swing the election.
Tower Hamlets Conservative councillor Peter Golds said: ‘There is increasing evidence of ongoing electoral corruption. I am concerned that there will be no attempt to investigate this before election day.
‘All the dodgy addresses seem to involve Bangladeshi names, and the police are terrified of investigating that community for fear of being branded racists.
Tight race: David Cameron runs along the seafront in Blackpool yesterday
‘At one of the addresses, a Russian woman answers the door. How many Bangladeshi men live together with a Russian woman?’
Numerous other examples of this corruption are coming to light, including a visitor from Bangladesh who arrives with a tourist visa next week, but whose postal vote has already been sent off.
The problem is not confined to London. In Yorkshire, five police investigations are under way in Bradford and Calderdale, where two arrests have been already been made.
In Derby, police are investigating several claims of electoral fraud, including one case where a female voter was allegedly intimidated by three men who demanded that she fill in and sign postal votes for the Labour Party.
In Surrey, Tory activists have received reports that two members of a rival party pretended to be Conservatives and bullied a man on a ventilator in hospital into signing over his postal vote to them.
Under election law, anyone from Commonwealth countries can vote in the general election if resident in the UK.
But names can be added to the electoral roll – and become eligible for postal votes – without anyone checking their identities or whether they are actually in the country.
In 2005 around 15 per cent of all votes were cast using a postal vote, but the Electoral Commission watchdog believes that figure will rise this time.
In the last month there were 150,000 applications and, in some areas, postal vote registrations have increased by 200 per cent since 2005.
Surveys of the most marginal seats, where the election will be decided, have revealed a surge in postal voting.
In the key marginals Edinburgh South and Barnet, postal votes are up by 60 per cent, while Brighton has seen an increase of 40 per cent in voter registration.
Standing tall: Nick Clegg with his wife Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, right and television presenter Floella Benjamin, left, at the Palace Project community centre in Streatham
In Islington, a vital Labour-Lib Dem marginal, the numbers on the electoral roll have increased by nearly 20,000 to 135,800 in just five years.
The Electoral Commission, which oversees the elections process, warned seven years ago that widespread postal voting is open to fraud.
But rules to ensure that every voter has to provide personal ID before joining the electoral roll will not come into force for three years.
LEO MCKINSTRY: Postal passport to ballot frauds - a farce that shames democracy
The integrity of our voting system used to be taken for granted. Whatever their allegiance, voters could have absolute faith in the outcome of a General Election.
But, like so many other British traditions, the credibility of our democracy has been badly weakened during the last 13 years of Labour rule.
Thanks to the introduction of mass postal voting on demand, the stench of malpractice now hangs over the process, whether it be through serial abuses on the electoral roll or widespread fraud in the casting of postal votes.
The postal voting process is easily open to manipulation
With the result of the General Election so uncertain and the gap between the three main parties so narrow, the potential for corruption is deeply worrying.
This Thursday postal voting will play a far bigger role than in any previous contest, with more than seven million people having registered for a postal ballot.
In the last month alone, there were 150,000 applications and, in some areas, the number of registrations for postal votes has increased by 200 per cent compared with the 2005 election.
Yet, unlike voting at a polling station, the postal process is easily open to manipulation by political parties and criminals because no proper checks are made on the electors’ identities.
The same problem applies to the electoral roll, where names are added or removed without effective investigation, a flaw compounded by the phenomenal demographic upheaval caused by mass immigration.
With an annual inflow running at over 500,000 and emigration by Britons reaching almost 400,000 a year, electoral registers have increasingly turned into little more than works of fiction.
The Government and its agencies have been celebrating the recent surge in registrations and postal vote applications as evidence of a new enthusiasm for politics amongst the electorate, due partly to the TV debates.
The reality is that it has undermined the whole democratic process.
A study by the Council of Europe in 2008 stated that ‘the voting system in Great Britain is open to electoral fraud’, since it was ‘childishly simple’ to register bogus voters, while ‘postal voting provides the anonymity to carry out fraud without detection’.
Particularly disturbing is the position in the crucial marginal seats that will decide the outcome of election.
Here, in a desperate drive to boost support, all the major parties have been making intensive efforts to increase registration and postal voting.
In Edinburgh South, a vital three-way marginal, postal votes are up by 60 per cent, while in the London borough of Islington, scene of a bitter fight between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, the numbers on the electoral roll have increased by nearly 20,000 to 135,800 since 2005.
Kerry McCarthy was reported to police after she put postal vote results on her Twitter page
Five police investigations are under way in the Yorkshire conurbations of Bradford and Calderdale, where two arrests have been made.
In London, police are examining 28 allegations of major abuses across 12 boroughs. In one typical case, a resident of Bethnal Green was surprised to learn that eight complete strangers were also registered at the small flat she shares with her partner.
Responding to mounting concern about corruption, John Turner, chief executive of the Association of Electoral Administrators, admitted ‘fraudulent activity’ was easy to perpetrate.
‘It’s not a properly verified system and it should be.’
This growing threat to democracy has happened entirely because of decisions taken by Labour.
Despite strong opposition, it pressed ahead in 2004 with the introduction of postal voting on demand without any safeguards or tightening of the register.
Before then, voters had to provide a valid reason why they needed to vote by post, such as work commitments, disability or holiday.
The theoretical justification was to boost turnout at a time of growing public apathy. But in reality, Labour saw that an insecure-system could work to the party’s advantage in urban areas where the population is more fluid.
This is particularly true among inner-city wards dominated by Asian clan leaders who effectively control the local franchise and even set up ‘voting factories’ to process ballot papers.
Almost all the worst instances of fraud since 2000 have arisen in places with large concentrations of Asian voters, such as Blackburn, Oldham and Tower Hamlets.
In the Birmingham local elections of 2004, six Muslim men stole thousands of ballot papers and marked them for Labour candidates. The Election Commissioner, Richard Mawrey QC, said at their trial that the contest ‘would have disgraced a banana republic’.
Yet the problem remains as bad as ever. A BBC report last week found that Asian activists are targeting British Pakistanis who have relocated in their thousands to the Pakistan district of Maipur.
The activists are going door to door asking any who are still eligible for a British vote to sign over their entitlement to a proxy or postal vote.
As a result, it is claimed that many have signed forms for this week’s elections, without knowing who they are voting for.
This is a farce that shames democracy. But Labour, desperate to cling on to power, does not care about rebuilding trust. Partisan gain is all that matters.
Labour’s willingness to exploit a dodgy system was graphically illustrated in its two unexpected recent by-election triumphs in Scotland.
At Glenrothes in 2008, the neighbouring seat to Gordon Brown’s at Kirkcaldy, there was a fourfold increase in postal ballots and Labour’s opponents demanded to see the marked official register which showed whether individuals had voted or not.
Unbelievably, the Sheriff ’s Clerk’s Office in Kirkcaldy had to explain, after five months, that the register had ‘gone missing’.
And Labour’s win in Glasgow North East last November followed a dramatic increase in postal votes, with almost 2,000 applications submitted less than three days before the registration deadline.
The Electoral Commission complained that Labour ‘did not comply’ with the code of conduct on the submission of postal-vote applications.
Labour would no doubt just dismiss this as scaremongering. But the truth is that the Government’s own cynicism towards the voting process could make this the most tainted, distorted result in General Election history.
One disquieting straw in the wind could be seen last Friday, when Kerry McCarthy, Labour candidate for Bristol East, revealed details on her Twitter page of an early sample of postal votes
She has been accused of breaching electoral law, since candidates are not meant to release such information.
But even more alarming is the apparent extent of her lead, despite Labour’s fall to third place in most opinion polls. If Labour is still in power on Friday, the entire voting system will be in the dock.
Manish has been divorced from this campaign for some time 