A POSTMAN was threatened with death unless he handed over a sack of postal ballots, a judge investigating claims of mass vote-rigging by Labour supporters was told yesterday.

The man was offered £500 for the votes and his life was threatened, it was alleged at a court looking at claims that the party had cheated to take first place in elections to England’s biggest council. A riot of 200 people erupted after another postman, a Somali asylum-seeker, handed a package to a candidate in what was described as the fetid poll for Birmingham City Council.

“The rumour was (that) the Labour candidates had bribed post office workers to hand them blank ballots without going through the middle man: the voter,” John Hemming, the city’s Liberal Democrat leader, told the court. He said that cheating had been condoned by the city’s Labour leadership. “There was an informal discussion about how to abuse the postal ballot system, which involved a number of Labour activists in a number of wards,” he said.

“Personation has gone on for a number of years. The procedures to handle election fraud are difficult to make use of, although the changes in the law resulting from the relaxation of the rules on absent ballots have made the process of defrauding the election much easier.”

The Lib Dems made allegations of vote-rigging a campaigning issue in last June’s elections, the court heard. A leaflet just before the poll referred to the discovery by the police in Aston ward of Labour candidates in a warehouse at midnight with 273 postal ballots. Nobody was charged.

Petitioners want to overturn the election of three councillors in Aston, where a Lib Dem majority of 500 became a similar Labour lead, bucking the national trend in an area with many Muslims said to be hostile to the Iraq war.

An officer gave evidence that he was instructed to hand over the votes confiscated from the warehouse, still in a sealed West Midlands Police property bag, to the council for inclusion in the count. The city’s elections officer had said that no electoral offence had been committed, the court heard.

Labour’s problems deepened when the judge said the party’s leader in Birmingham, Sir Albert Bore, may have encouraged party supporters to cheat by making an inaccurate public statement about the relaxed laws on postal voting. Sir Albert had been quoted in the press as saying: “As a candidate I am allowed to apply for postal voting on your behalf, collect the forms, have it delivered to my address, fill it in for you, put it together and deliver it to the elections office. There is nothing illegal about it, but it looks and it feels wrong. That is why the system needs to be looked at again. It is very concerning the way the postal vote system is being used.”

Mr Hemming suggested that this had acted as a tip-off to Labour supporters. “Making such a statement does condone such activity,” the Lib Dem leader said. “It says it looks wrong but it is not illegal.”

The judge said: “If that is what Sir Albert is reported as saying — he may be misquoted — it may be argued that this is not an accurate statement of the law. “Certainly the first part of the statement is inaccurate. I am sure Sir Albert would say he believed that was the correct position but, if it is not the correct position and people have relied on him to go out and do that, he may find himself in trouble. If, wittingly or unwittingly, the leader of the council sets people on a trail which may well be unlawful then the consequences, the ramifications, may be considerable.”

Mr Hemming is prospective candidate for Estelle Morris’s marginal Birmingham Yardley seat, the 17th on his party’s target list, the court heard.

Labour remained the biggest party in Birmingham in the June poll but lost control after 20 years to a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition.

The trial continues.

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