SOME 20,000 missing votes became the focus of Britain’s biggest election count early today. Early indications showed that a third of postal votes issued for the 11 constituencies in Birmingham had not been returned.

Explanations include late delivery, fraudsters afraid of filling them in because of extra police attention, or low turnout. However, postal voting typically results in high turnouts of up to 80 per cent because voters are seen as more motivated.

Birmingham is the scene of several marginals where the parties have used mass postal voting to try to capture or hold seats. The total number of postal votes issued in the city was 59,000 compared with 16,000 at the last election.

But Lin Homer the returning officer disclosed last night that only 37,000-43,000 arrived. She said: “It might be that people have thought again about postal voting because of the uncertainty. Some of it could have been because of the work we have been doing. We have conducted 700 door-to-door interviews and forensically examined data.”

Another investigation into missing postal votes was mounted yesterday as tens of thousands of voters decided to hand in their postal ballot papers at polling stations.

Council officials in Scotland were granted a court order after evidence that about a dozen postal votes had gone missing in Aberdeen South, a key marginal seat The deputy returning officer was granted a court order to begin an inquiry to see if there had been any irregularities. The latest investigation comes after 15 separate police inquiries into electoral fraud allegations, including two arrests by West Yorkshire Police.

Returning officers reported earlier that between 50 and 70 per cent of the estimated 6.5 million postal-vote applications had been returned early yesterday morning. But hundreds of thousands of postal votes across the country were still turning up in the second post yesterday and more were expected after a final Royal Mail sweep of its centres until 9.30pm last night.

Many election officers were predicting average postal vote turnout to be at least 70 per cent, with higher percentages in marginal seats.

One returning officer in Norwich reported that he had received 2,500 postal votes in two mail deliveries yesterday but was expecting a further thousand to be handed in.

“We have heard that a number of people are taking their postal votes to polling stations because they have concerns that they are going to be intercepted and fraudulently altered if they take them to the Royal Mail,” an Electoral Reform Society spokesman said.

The society also said that many people had expressed concerns about secrecy after handing in their ballots. He said that some people had complained that when handing in ballots in Hackney, East London, the papers had been “piled up on a table and could easily be bundled away”. A spokeswoman for Hackney said that all postal ballot envelopes handed in would be put into special bags before being taken to council offices.

Signs of legal challenges emerged yesterday when a candidate in St Albans, Hertforshire, made an official complaint of electoral irregularities in her marginal seat. Anne Main, the Tory candidate who is defending a 4,466 majority, is said to have asked the police to investigate alleged fraud.

Hundreds of voters in two London constituencies were told that they could not vote because of clerical errors. The mistakes, affecting the London borough of Hounslow, were found too late to be corrected.

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