What started as a reform to increase British election turnout has descended to such a farce that staff counting this Thursday’s polls have needed lessons from the Forensic Science Service.

Postal voting on demand was supposed to herald a democratic golden age of greater participation and social inclusion, but its benefits have been exaggerated, a report concludes today.

Suspicions of cheating, though, have become so grave that every London borough has sent poll officials for training by police experts on how to detect whether voters’ signatures have been forged.

The story of how Britain slumped from a century of faith in the fairness of its elections is outlined by the Rowntree trust. The report shows that half the convictions for electoral malpractice since 2000 happened in just four Muslim communities in Lancashire and Birmingham.

Since 2000, accusations of election cheating have been investigated by every police force in England, with the exception of the City of London Police.

“Outside ministerial circles, there is a widespread view that a fundamental overhaul of UK electoral law, administration and policy is urgently required,” the report says.

It traces the rot back to the 1990s, when there was an increase in complaints about bogus “proxy” votes, in which a voter gives someone permission to vote on their behalf.

The growth of this problem should have made it easy to recognise that the introduction of postal voting on demand in 2000 would make the system vulnerable to large-scale fraud, the report states.

Although postal voting on demand led to an increased turnout initially, it appears that this levelled off and fell at subsequent elections.

An investigation by The Times found widespread allegations of postal vote fraud in Yorkshire and northwest England on the eve of the 2004 local elections.

Ministers dismissed the claims until Labour had won the 2005 general election. Tony Blair then announced a modest Bill which, after another investigation by The Times into alleged vote rigging in Coventry, was repeatedly rejected by the Lords as too soft.

The provisions of the Electoral Administration Act 2006, which the Commons eventually passed, “fall short of what is required to ensure that electoral malpractice is kept to an absolute minimum”, today’s report says.

The new law requires people registering for postal votes to provide a signature and date of birth that can be checked when their vote is received through the post.

The change has provided a considerable headache for officials running this week’s polls. With at least 700,000 of London’s 5.5 million electorate expected to vote by post, town hall administrators are battling to avoid both technical glitches and fraud. It is the first time that London has used the new system.

John Bennett, deputy returning officer for the Greater London Authority, conceded that about 40 per cent of postal votes might need to be checked by hand.

“Two officials from every borough have been trained by the Forensic Science Service in recognising handwriting,” he said. The trainees were told how to detect forgeries by studying pen pressure on parts of the signature.

Vote-rigging has been linked to the biraderi (brotherhood) traditions of Pakistani, Kashmiri and Bangladeshi clans, the report says.

Half the convictions for electoral malpractice since 2000 came from Muslim parts of Oldham, Blackburn, Burnley and Birmingham.

Politicians had achieved “dramatic electoral success” by allying themselves to clans. But postal voting deprived women in particular of the secrecy of the ballot box, enabling clan chiefs to force relatives to mark their ballots at home for the clan’s chosen candidate.

“The biraderi system is widely recognised to have provided significant forms of mutual support in those British Asian communities in which it has persisted, particularly for newly arrived migrants joining established communities in the UK,” the report says.

“However, the hierarchical and essentially patriarchal nature of biraderi associations has drawn much criticism, particularly among second and third-generation British Asians. In particular, it is widely suggested that extended family and kinship networks, frequently with their origins in settlement patterns in Pakistan and Bangladesh, are mobilised to secure the support of up to several hundred electors, effectively constituting a ‘block vote’.

“It has been widely suggested that the biraderi system disenfranchises voters, given the combination of a patriarchal clan system and widespread use of postal voting, in which ballot papers are completed within the family home or, in some cases, taken to a central facility (so called ‘voting factories’) for completion by party representatives.”

Only 46 per cent of British Asians regard postal voting as safe.

“The clearest trend in patterns of electoral malpractice over the past two decades is that what was once seen as a specifically Northern Irish problem has since become a specifically English one,” the report states.

However, Northern Ireland also holds the solution. Postal votes there are limited to those who cannot get to the polling booth, rather than being given on demand.

A successful anti-fraud law in 2002 required all of the province’s voters to register individually, providing their signature, national insurance number and date of birth, which can be checked when they vote. Electors must produce photographic identification before being issued a ballot paper in a polling booth.

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