There are just six weeks to go until the one day a year when we can enjoy a few hours of freedom from the surveillance society. I refer, of course, to local election day, when all those irritating formalities such as having to produce our passports, utilities bills and fingerprints are suspended. I am certainly looking forward to it. All ten of me, that is, not to mention the 140 lodgers living in my attic.

Rather less impressed by our electoral system are voters in Slough - the genuine ones, that is, rather than the 11 registered as living in one small terraced house at the time of last year's local elections. On Tuesday, Eshaq Khan, a Tory who won a council seat in the town by 120 votes, was found guilty of vote rigging after 145 postal ballot forms were found to have been returned on behalf of voters who do not exist. He is not alone. In 2005, a judge ruled that the Labour Party had rigged postal votes across Birmingham in a “fraud that would have disgraced a banana republic”.

Equally shocking is the complacency from the main political parties. A backbench MP who makes a tasteless joke can expect summary dismissal. Yet when their grassroots activists are caught fraudulently casting votes, we hear nothing from party leaderships other than a limp assurance that most members would never do this sort of thing.

One of this Government's proud achievements has been helping to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq - where elections were policed by imprinting a finger of every voter with indelible ink. Yet at home it has corrupted an electoral system that the world once looked up to. Ministers were warned as long ago as May 2000 about the lack of security in postal votes. Yet they ploughed on, claiming that postal voting would reinvigorate the electoral system by encouraging more to vote.

Postal voting has certainly achieved that - at least among the deceased and fictitious. Never mind an indelible fingerprint; in Britain you can put any name on the electoral register with little chance of the information being checked. You can apply for a postal vote in someone else's name, and, astonishingly, have the ballot paper sent to an address other than where the voter is registered as living. In a remarkable exception to the Government's commitment to equality, electoral registration forms are posted not directly to the voter but to the household, helping bullying community elders to cast block votes.

I quite understand that politicians want to be loved and are keen for everyone to vote. But in an age when we can't visit Calais without handing over our biometric data, is it really too much to expect voters to present themselves in person, with their voting cards, before being allowed to choose their representatives?

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