OFFICIAL documents that can provide protection against voting fraud have vanished from dozens of constituencies around the country, the Government has admitted.

In a serious breach of election security, 42 public registers showing who voted in the general election last year are wholly or partly missing, the Department for Constitutional Affairs has confirmed.

Opposition MPs accused the Government of negligence, saying that the disappearances, in England and Wales, raised doubts about Labour’s commitment to tackle election fraud.

In the constituency of Woking, which has a history of voting disputes, the entire “marked register” showing who purportedly cast 46,045 recorded votes, has vanished.

Lynne Featherstone, the Liberal Democrat MP whose Commons questions have highlighted the problem, adopted the withering tones of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell. “To lose one database, Ms Harman, [Minister in the Department for Constitutional Affairs] may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose 42 looks like carelessness,” she said.

Responsibility for the documents is invested in the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery, whose duties also include custody of the Great Seal of the Realm. He has delegated the job of looking after election papers to Pickfords Record Management.

The fiasco has renewed pressure on ministers to change the system so that documents from general elections would be kept by town halls instead of being sent to the Government.

The marked registers are an important anti-fraud tool. Whenever people enter a polling station to vote, they are given a ballot paper and their names are crossed off the list of local electors. All these lists of voters should be compiled to form the constituency’s marked register.

Political parties study the registers after elections to ensure that nobody has voted fraudulently, such as by adopting a false identity, and to ensure that the number of votes matches the number of names crossed off the list.

There was an unexpected fourfold surge in demand nationally for copies of marked registers immediately after the last general election, when awareness of potential fraud was high.

The police investigate election fraud. No inquiries from last May’s poll have resulted in prosecutions although a man of 54 was cautioned by North Yorkshire Police for “personation” in Richmond. Last July, two months after the election, there were still 444 outstanding requests to see the registers. In November Harriet Harman admitted to the Commons that 99 registers were wholly, or partly, missing.

A hunt has recovered some of those missing pages but only shortly before the registers are due to be destroyed, along with all other election papers, a year after the May poll.

“This is bloody ridiculous and somebody has to look into it seriously,” Ms Featherstone said. “It makes one wonder how far this ‘carelessness’ goes. There is a real danger of electoral fraud.”

The registers are supposed to be sent from polling stations to the count. The next day, they should be placed into sacks and sent by Royal Mail to London. Finally, the bundles are sent to the removal experts Pickfords for storage who are said to store them in East London.

A spokesman for the Electoral Reform Society said: “Marked registers are one of the major ways of checking against fraud. If they have gone missing, they can’t be reconstructed. If there is an allegation that comes to light, it cannot be proved or disproved.”

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