A High Court judge accused the Government of being in denial over the threat of rigged postal ballots after quashing election results for two wards of Birmingham City Council for "massive, systematic and organised fraud".

Richard Mawrey QC, sitting as an election commissioner in a civil hearing, found six Labour Party councillors reponsible for corrupt and illegal practices during the poll of June 10 last year.

He said at the hearing at the Birmingham and Midland Institute that he was satisfied that the fraud was "overwhelming" and had been orchestrated by local party officials regarding elections for the Aston and Bordesley Green wards.

Mr Mawrey then attacked both the Government for denying the problem of election fraud and the police for failing to take it seriously. "This system is wide open to fraud and any would-be political fraudster knows that it’s wide open to fraud," he said.

The judge's comments come the day before Tony Blair is expected to name May 5 as the date of the next general election and one political party involved in the Birmingham vote said that the case suggested that postal vote fraud would blight the general election as well.

Mr Mawrey said: "In the course of preparing my judgment, my attention was drawn to what I am told is an official Government statement about postal voting which I hope I quote correctly: ’There are no proposals to change the rules governing election procedures for the next election, including those for postal voting. The systems already in place to deal with the allegations of electoral fraud are clearly working.’

"Anybody who has sat through the case I have just tried and listened to evidence of electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic would find this statement surprising. To assert that ’the systems already in place to deal with the allegations of electoral fraud are clearly working’ indicates a state not simply of complacency but of denial.

"The systems to deal with fraud are not working well. They are not working badly. The fact is that there are no systems to deal realistically with fraud and there never have been. Until there are, fraud will continue unabated."

Mr Mawrey, who finished hearing the second of two petitions raised against the councillors last month, said the scheme for registering postal votes was "hopelessly insecure". Reading from his executive summary, he said elections officers had no means of checking the validity of the signature on an application form or on a postal ballot nor were they required to do so.

He said the provision for forms to be sent to addresses other than those listed on the Electoral Register gave a "positive assistance to fraud" and the fact they were sent out in ordinary mail in clearly identifiable envelopes did not help.

"Short of writing ’Steal Me’ on the envelopes, it is hard to see what more could be done to ensure their coming into the wrong hands," Mr Mawrey added.

The judge described the witness signature required on Declaration of Identity forms as a "pointless precaution" because it could not be verified and suggested the law was "indifferent" as to how completed ballots arrived at the elections office.

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