British elections are “childishly simple” to rig since Labour gave everybody the right to a postal vote without safeguards, an investigation by the Council of Europe said yesterday.

A report by the organisation, which was founded in 1949 to protect human rights, pluralist democracy and the rule of law, and which has 47 member countries, delivered a remarkably harsh indictment of a Western country’s election standards, saying that Britain’s system was now open to fraud.

At the moment, in England, Scotland and Wales, the head of a household registers everyone who is claimed to be living at an address and postal ballots are sent if requested. The council’s report urged the adoption of the system in Northern Ireland, where every voter must register separately, using his or her national insurance number.

Political activists should also be banned from handling postal ballots, the Council of Europe said, although this practice has become commonplace among the main British parties.

If Britain fails to improve, it may suffer the indignity of being placed under full monitoring by the council, whose recent targets include President Putin’s Russia.

Last night the Government insisted that it had already introduced any needed improvements to the system.

Widespread allegations of the rigging of postal votes were first reported by The Times in the local and European elections of 2004. After the 2005 general election, Tony Blair introduced the Electoral Administration Act, providing limited safeguards against fraud. The House of Lords wanted tougher standards but ministers stood firm.

The Council of Europe was called in by the Conservative MP David Wilshire, a former Home Office ministerial aide. A two-strong fact-finding team was sent to Britain.

Their report says: “The combination of the household registration system without personal identifiers and the ‘postal vote on demand’ arrangements . . . makes it extremely easy to add bogus characters to the voters’ lists.

“As long as the names on the registration form are not overly frivolous, and the number of bogus entries is not unrealistically large in comparison to the residency in question, all names will be de facto accepted on face value and added to the voters’ list.”

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