Those who speed through red lights are not entitled to much sympathy if they come a cropper. This applies to ministers of the Crown as well as motorists. As we report today, concerns about the conduct of the postal ballot deployed in parts of the country last June were made frequently and by a number of important organisations. They were simply ignored. There is currently an election court sitting in Birmingham that will deal with allegations that 2,000 false votes were cast for the Labour Party in the West Midlands. It would be wrong to prejudge the outcome of those proceedings. What is clear, though, is that the potential for abuse was created by a decision to proceed with postal ballots in a part of Britain where the advice of neutral professionals was that the integrity of the entire poll would be endangered.

Allegations of political corruption are, with a few exceptions in Northern Ireland, unusual. This may be surprising as, for example, it is not necessary for electors to produce proof of identification when they obtain a ballot at polling stations. Well before the 2004 local and European elections, though, anecdotal evidence implied that impersonation and fraud were increasing. Legislation framed in Victorian times required considerable updating. Despite this, an ambitious attempt was made to move into a new era of elections via the post box, not the ballot box. This was an exercise which should have been approached with extreme caution. It cannot be claimed that the Department for Constitutional Affairs acted thus. Communications from the Electoral Matters Panel of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives were received and rejected. Civil servants seem to have tried to raise the alarm but were ignored. It was reasonable of ministers to want to encourage more voters to participate. It was not right to take risks with the quality of the poll itself to meet that objective. This newspaper argued throughout last spring that there was a new opportunity for mischief in these elections that was entirely unacceptable. To be fair to ministers, they were consistent. They ignored us as well as their independent advisers.

This affair might, depending on the outcome in Birmingham, evolve from a disgrace to a scandal. For there seems little doubt that the Labour Party believed that the higher the turnout, the better it would do, and that sense was not exactly inconsequential in the debate whether to take the possibility of postal vote misbehaviour seriously. Early experiments with ballots cast in this fashion had, to be fair, largely been encouraging, if not without some suspicion as to their nature. But to rush, for example, from a reasonable trial with these ballots in Watford in one year to demanding that vast regions of England engage in them shortly afterwards was improper. The Government should admit candidly that this was an error.

It is to be hoped that similar difficulties will not mar the forthcoming general election. It would be appalling if the whiff of malpractice forced certain results to be challenged in the courts, with those constituencies left in limbo. The hanging chads of Florida should not be followed by fictitious ballots in Fife or Finchley. Lessons have to be learnt from this avoidable debacle. And if the Birmingham court decides that the law was broken, then there are ministers who were serving at the Constitutional Affairs Department who should consider their positions.