By common consent, the issue that will dominate the general election called yesterday is trust. Yet at more or less the moment that the Prime Minister fired the starting gun, the realisation was sinking in that the electoral process now under way can no longer be trusted to be free of the taint of corruption.

Finding six Labour councillors guilty of fraud at last year’s council election in two Birmingham wards, the special election commissioner, Richard Mawrey QC, said the episode would ‘disgrace a banana republic’. These councillors had set up a vote rigging factory where they doctored possibly thousands of votes by stealing, filling in and altering ballot papers in a battle for council control that involved death threats, intimidation and bribery.

But the significance of Mr Mawrey’s utterly devastating report is infinitely greater than a handful of corrupt Birmingham councillors. For what he uncovered was not only a ‘massive, systematic and organised’ fraud supported by the local Labour party which, faced with the collapse of Muslim support over the war in Iraq, simply falsified the vote to deliver a Labour victory as implausible as it was overwhelming.

He revealed that the whole electoral process itself was susceptible to precisely the same kind of manipulation of postal votes and that such fraud would continue unabated. And indeed, many other examples of rigged elections, vote-stealing and intimidation have previously come to light. Police are now investigating claims of similar voter fraud in six other areas. Reporters from various newspapers applied successfully for bundles of postal votes, even though the names under which they made these applications were either fictitious or belonged to real people who lived at quite different addresses. The system is intrinsically wide open to abuse. No identity checks are made, and the ballot papers are clearly identified. As Mr Mawrey observed, short of writing ‘Steal Me’ on the envelopes it is hard to see what more could be done to promote fraud.

The examples that have come to light have centred on the Muslim community, which is said to be particularly vulnerable to manipulation because of its high levels of illiteracy, community activism and the way its men instruct the rest of their families how to vote. As a result, those who have tried to sound the alarm have found themselves vilified — like the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Greaves, who when he spoke of people walking down the street with fistfuls of voting papers belonging to others was promptly accused of racism.

But as if the findings of fraud themselves were not bad enough, the real sting of Mr Mawrey’s excoriating report lay in the response by the Government, which simply refused to accept there was a problem. This is because when it pushed through the expansion of postal voting in 2000, it rode roughshod over warnings that it was thereby opening up the electoral system to abuse. It closed its ears to such concerns because, in its ineffably naive New Labour way, it thought the way to combat low turnout at elections -- and bring out its own supporters among the young and disaffected -- was to make it easier for people to vote.

But in its historical ignorance, it failed to grasp the crucial point that the requirement to turn up in person at a polling station was devised precisely because corruption is only prevented by such a public display.

It was all too obvious that the subsequent enormous rise in applications for postal votes — which in some places had tripled, and with no checks being made — indicated that the system was being grossly abused. Yet the government still ignored it. Worse still, the Labour party put Mr Mawrey himself under pressure, obstructing him at every turn and trying to postpone his inquiry until after the general election. Indeed, Mr Mawrey is the hero of the hour, and his courage in refusing to back down under this kind of pressure should be saluted.

Yet the government is still refusing to accept that there is a problem. Fatuously, it tried to dismiss Mr Mawrey’s report as ‘scaremongering’. Yesterday, the local government minister Nick Raynsford feebly suggested no greater safeguard than asking returning officers to take action on voter fraud. As a result of this persistent denial, the stench of corruption now reaches all the way from the Birmingham Labour party to the Government itself. It not only ignored the warnings about postal voting, not only ignored the mounting evidence of fraud but is even now trying to pretend it doesn’t exist.

The irony is that the low voter turnout that this extension of postal voting ostensibly aimed to combat arose from the calamitous erosion of public trust in the political class. But as a result of the fraud it introduced, now voters realise that they can’t even trust the electoral process itself.

What makes you want to weep is that this is happening in Britain of all places — the country that first invented clean elections in the great reforms of the Victorian era. We appear to be going back in time to a pre-modern age, before Gladstone cleaned up politics of its endemic corruption and developed a disinterested civil service and administrative class that produced a democratic process of transparent integrity.

Alas, no longer. The civil service has been politicised and emasculated to the point where it stands supinely by while constitutional proprieties are systematically shredded one by one. The police, too, have shown themselves incapable of responding appropriately to evidence of racketeering, intimidation and corruption. When the LibDems gave the West Midlands police a list of allegations during last year’s election campaign, said Mr Mawrey, they responded with an ‘Olympian detachment’.

It was only because of Mr Mawrey’s own detective work that this corruption was unearthed—and with it the appalling erosion of electoral probity. The supposed guardians of our democracy appear no longer to care that it is being suborned, and display only a cavalier contempt for standards of public integrity.

People in Britain looked on in amazement at the way President Bush’s bitterly contested first election was ultimately decided by a court. But with postal ballot fraud now rife, there is a distinct possibility that in certain highly contested seats, the result of this general election may similarly depend on a judge’s ruling.

What a sorry pass to which our country has now been brought. The integrity of our electoral system has been seriously compromised. Record numbers —some 15 per cent of voters —have applied for postal ballots. The potential for abuse — and possible legal paralysis — seems immense.

The situation is too serious for inadequate ‘safeguards’. Voter apathy could now be exacerbated by voter disgust as people simply refuse to vote in a Tammany Hall election. Postal voting must simply be scrapped altogether if this coming election is not to turn into a dangerous farce and public trust— and democracy itself — is not to be further undermined.

Posted by melanie at April 6, 2005