MORE than 1m “ghost” voters have been uncovered who threaten to undermine the result of next month’s local council elections.

An analysis by Britain’s electoral watchdog has estimated that there are at least 1m and possibly up to 3.5m people whose names appear on the electoral roll even though they are ineligible to vote.

The disclosure will fuel concerns over the extent of electoral fraud, which critics claim the government has down-played in order to extend postal voting, which benefits Labour candidates.

The names include illegal immigrants, bogus voters, foreign residents and those who are registered at more than one address. Officials fear that in marginal areas, election results could be affected by abuse of “ghost” votes.

The Electoral Commission is using pollster GfK NOP to interview thousands of voters to accurately quantify the level of fraudulent voting. People will be questioned and their answers compared with the information held on the electoral roll. Senior officials say that in some areas the electoral roll is thought to be only 60% accurate.

Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, a govern-ment-appointed expert whose research into the problem prompted the commission to act, said the government was unwilling to face the truth about the extent of electoral fraud.

“The government has been trying to put the lid on this because they don’t want to undermine public confidence in the system,” he said. “However, the level of errors on the electoral roll and the extent of fraud is far greater than they have been prepared to admit.”

The commission recently received a file from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which reveals that it had studied at least 390 cases of suspected electoral fraud in England and Wales from 2000 to 2006.

The list does not cover cases in Scot-land and Northern Ireland, nor more serious cases that are prosecuted under fraud rather than electoral laws.

In 2005 ministers told parliament that cases of electoral fraud were “very rare.” However, the CPS evidence reveals that multiple cases have resulted in court action and several people have been jailed. In many cases, people had illegally registered bogus voters.

Last summer the commission wrotea memo for officials attempting to calculate the scale of “ghost” voting. It uses two methodologies to calculate the number of redundant votes — one that estimates the figure at 1m and another, devised by Pinto-Duschinsky, that predicts a higher figure of 3.5m.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• The bright side of this winter rain
• Story behind the picture: Snow Leopard, 2008
• Times Charity Appeal: The Place2Be