ELECTORAL watchdogs demanded urgent legal safeguards yesterday to stop postal voting fraud and restore public confidence in the electoral system.

The Electoral Commission, which advises the Government, said that it was vital to improve the registration system and make it easier to prosecute people for electoral fraud.

“What is absolutely clear is that postal voting has knocked the public’s confidence in the system,” Sam Younger, the commission chairman, said hours after Britain’s largest exercise in postal voting, involving nearly six million voters.

The Government should draw up early legislation, with the co-operation of all parties, to improve the security and administration of the system, Mr Younger said.

He said that he was disappointed that ministers had repeatedly ignored the commission’s recommendations to make changes before the general election.

This month the commission will publish its “foundation model” for a future system. But experts gave warning that changes would need to be made rapidly if they were going to be in place for local council elections next year.

The Electoral Reform Society said that the current voting system was fundamentally flawed as it also called for a “root and branch” reform.

The comments came as 18 police investigations into electoral fraud were under way across the country, including two new ones by Greater Manchester Police and another in Leicester. There were widespread reports yesterday that postal votes had been misused, duplicated or lost in many constituencies, and a handful of legal challenges could still be mounted in the next 21 days.

Thousands of voters were also disenfranchised because of administrative errors or postal delays and 20,000 postal ballots vanished in Birmingham.

David Monks, head of the returning officers, said that local council officials would not put up with another election run under the same process. “This cannot happen again,” he said. “We have a 19th-century system from the horse and cart era.” Although Mr Monks did not want to ban postal voting, he said that the timetable would have to be changed to allow more time to process applications and councils would have to be given more resources.

“We need at least an extra week to process applications. Nominations of party candidates should close a week earlier so that we have more time to check postal vote applications for errors and fraud,” he said Mr Monks suggested that before every election random checks should be made of at least 10 per cent of each constituency electorate to verify postal applications.

Labour MPs demanded an urgent inquiry into the missing 20,000 ballot papers in Birmingham. There has still been no explanation of why nearly 60,000 ballot papers were sent out to 11 constituencies by Birmingham’s election office but only 40,000 were returned. Stephen McCabe, re-elected MP for Birmingham Hall Green, said that he had had complaints from elderly and disabled people who had not received their votes. “There’s clearly a problem. Even if it were only a handful of people, it’s people being deprived of their democratic right to vote.”

One possibility is that vote riggers, who made fraudulent applications for permanent postal votes last year, were afraid to use them this time because they knew that the authorities were promising to be vigilant in looking for fraud. This year Richard Mawrey, QC, the election commisioner, found six Birmingham Labour councillors guilty of fraud and corruption over last year’s local council elections.

Birmingham council said that it set up a hotline for people who did not receive postal votes on time so that it could issue them with fresh ballot papers but only received a “handful” of calls. The fiasco over postal voting first emerged during the local election and European campaigns last year, but despite advice from the Electoral Commission to the Government that legal safeguards were needed urgently, no regulations were introduced.

Ten days into the general election campaign, after Mr Mawrey had compared the British electoral system to that of a banana republic, the Government conceded that it would need to bring in changes.

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