Voters may have to take some form of photographic ID into the polling station under controversial proposals to reform the electoral system announced today.

The system needs urgently to be overhauled to restore voter confidence, protect against fraud and bring it into the 21st century, the Electoral Commission says. It calls on the Government to consider a national register with details of every voter to help to eliminate postal vote fraud.

This should be backed by individual registration, as opposed to the present system under which the head of each household registers the names of all voters living at that address.

The national register could replace or supplement the present system of local registers throughout the country. Every voter would have to provide a signature, date of birth and national insurance number.

Signatures and dates of birth are already matched against postal ballots. If individual registration for all voters goes ahead the commission wants further identifiers. Although photo ID would be a surer way of detecting fraud, the commission believes that might be less acceptable to voters than the other measures proposed. It says that the present system is under severe strain, with town hall chiefs having to respond to uncoordinated and often last-minute demands from ministers.

Its main recommendation is a comprehensive reform of the way elections are administered with new independent management boards set up in six English regions, Wales and Scotland.

Sam Younger, the commission chairman, said: “The planning and running of elections need to be robust and coordinated. We are still trying to run 21st-century elections with 19th-century structures and the system is under severe strain.”

Today’s report follows a series of criticisms from election judges and the Jospeh Rowntree Charitable Trust that efforts to increase postal voting had raised the risk of fraud and undermined public confidence.

This year Richard Mawrey, QC, said that the present system made “wholesale electoral fraud both easy and profitable” as he found a Conservative councillor guilty of vote rigging.

Ministers have ignored repeatedly the commission’s demands for individual registration. They argue privately that such a system could lead to fewer people registering to vote. But the commission says that the system, which could include a photo ID at the ballot box, would make postal fraud or impersonation much more difficult.

The commission’s push for a national register, however, could be more controversial. It would include the names and addresses, national insurance numbers and dates of birth of tens of millions of voters on one data-base, instead of on separate registers.

Peter Wall, the commission’s chief executive, argued that it would be much easier to spot fraud where individuals had registered in different constituencies or authorities. But this would have to be balanced against the risk of it falling into the wrong hands.

The report Electoral Administration in the UK was prompted partly by escalating incidences of fraud, first high-lighted by The Times in 2004 during the local and European elections. But the fiasco during the Scottish elections in May last year when nearly 5 per cent of ballot papers were spoilt or incomplete after confusion over the voting system was the prime instigator for the new recommendations.

Keeping count

— The 2004 local and European elections were marred by allegations of postal voting fraud in Yorkshire and North West England. In a failed experiment, all electors were required to vote by post

— Labour won elections to Britain’s biggest council, Birmingham, in 2004 by organising city-wide postal vote-rigging, a judge concluded. Richard Mawrey, QC, found “electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic”

— A Labour councillor was jailed for three years and seven months in 2005 for postal vote-rigging in Blackburn

— Voters in Coventry had their identities stolen by impostors in polling booths at the 2005 local elections

— Two Liberal Democrat councillors were each jailed for 18 months in 2006 for using proxy votes to rig the election in which Labour lost control of Burnley

— The Conservatives in Slough used postal votes to rig elections in 2007 in spite of the new Electoral Administration Act, which was supposed to reduce cheating. In another vigorous judgment, Mr Justice Mawrey said the system made “wholesale electoral fraud both easy and profitable”

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