TONY BLAIR may send independent observers to crack down on postal voting fraud at this month’s two by-elections, he told the House of Commons yesterday.

The unprecedented move is being discussed by party leaders because the two by-elections, in Birmingham Hodge Hill and Leicester South, fall in areas which had the highest number of allegations of abuse of postal votes in the local elections three weeks ago.

The extent of the problem was shown yesterday by an official legal challenge to the result in the Bordesley Green ward, one of the local election wards which makes up the Birmingham Hodge Hill constituency. It is the second legal challenge alleging that postal ballots were used to rig last month’s local elections.

A popular Birmingham Muslim party, the People’s Justice Party, lodged a petition in the High Court with claims of illegal activity in Bordesley Green. It included allegations of a postman being threatened with having his throat cut if he did not hand over a sack of blank postal ballots. The petition is served against the three Labour councillors who won in the ward.

Michael Howard told Mr Blair at Prime Minister’s Questions of reports of Birmingham “councillors sorting out ballots in the shadows of a back street car park”.

The Opposition leader said he feared a repeat of such scenes in the by-elections on July 15, because the unusually high numbers of those registered for postal votes in the Birmingham local election will automatically be sent a postal vote for the by-election. His party has written to the Electoral Commission to ask for special invigilators.

Unlike Leicester, Birmingham was not part of the all-postal pilot scheme at the local elections, but in certain wards there was an enormous take-up of postal votes.

This was almost exclusively centred on inner-city wards with a high Asian population, two of which, Bordesley Green and Washwood Heath, are included in the Hodge Hill constituency.

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