THIS IS HOW to rig the system: get a copy of the postal voting application form from the electoral registration office and photocopy it as many times as you wish. Choose names from the electoral roll. Apply in those names for a postal vote.

Request that they are diverted to an alternative address. Use safe houses such as bedsits where lots of people share the same letterbox, and get the bundles of votes delivered to them.

The council has no way of knowing that applications are bogus. To all appearances the honest work of a busy party door-knocker could produce the same result. True, a large number of applications for the same address might arouse suspicions, but as a practised vote-rigger you will know this by now and spread the addresses.

At election time, ballot papers will be sent to the safe houses, filled in by you or your accomplices, and returned to be counted. Again, officers have no way of telling they are false. True, some voters may arrive at the polling station to be surprised to learn that they have already been sent postal votes, but few will pursue the matter and if they do they may find the police uninterested. The Birmingham police codenamed their investigation into allegations of fraud at the last local election “Operation Gripe”.

Anyway they have no remedy. West Midlands Police received more than 50 complaints during that election. Nobody was charged. Defeated candidates who mount challenges face ruinous costs. And even if some of the doors to vote-rigging could be closed, new ones are opening. Postmen, often low-paid casual workers, were allegedly bribed and threatened in Birmingham into handing over bags of votes.

Party supporters turned up on doorsteps asking the unwary for completed ballot papers. The envelopes were reportedly opened and changed, sometimes using correction fluid. All these votes were presumably counted. In Birmingham, party supporters apparently arrived at the elections office with plastic bags stuffed with votes. These too were counted.

Ah yes, Birmingham: a city which seemed to have bucked the antiLabour trend when votes at the last local elections were counted. And a city in which the Labour Party’s canvassers threw themselves with particular enthusiasm into the Government’s new postal voting system — not, mark you, the all-postal voting piloted in four regions for the Euro-elections, but the system offering a postal vote “on demand”, without (as used to be the rule) any requirement to show need. The change was made five years ago, to improve voter turnout, ministers said. To improve Labour-voter turnout, others said. It will be in force on May 5.

The result in Birmingham last time was dramatic. In one ward more than 4,000 applications were lodged within 13 days, overwhelming the council. Before postal voting on demand was introduced, Birmingham had only 7,000 postal votes. That has risen to 70,000. It is still rising and will soar.

So how did the postal voting work out last time, in Birmingham? Glance at a closing argument submitted by counsel this week at England’s first full election court for 30 years: a hearing on the alleged massive and systematic fraud. Rather than repeat the accusations, I offer you extracts from the best that their own counsel could do for two of the men accused of voterigging for Labour:

The warehouse incident

“Much has been made of the incident at the NT warehouse, where Mr Kazi and Mr Islam were found by the police seated at a table with 275 postal vote envelopes. There is a dispute as to whether the majority of the envelopes containing ballot papers were open. The court will recall that, remarkably, the police made no notes at the time . . .

“John Owen (the Birmingham election officer, said in evidence): ‘On the face of it, the postal votes appeared legitimate and it was not for me to go behind this and speculate whether signatures or markings on documents inside the sealed envelopes had been forged or altered.’ . . .

“It is submitted that the worst that can be said about the warehouse incident is that it looks suspicious (but)that it would be quite wrong . . . to conclude guilt of any of those at the warehouse for corruption and forgery.”

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