British judge rules against postal voting

Daily Mail, UK - Postal voting is ‘wide open to fraud’ and should be scrapped in its current form, a top judge warned last night.

Judge Richard Mawrey, who sits in judgment on election fraud cases, said ballot-rigging was now a ‘probability’ in some parts of Britain due to the extension of postal voting.

Mr Mawrey, a deputy high court judge, said the introduction of ‘on demand’ postal voting had failed to boost turnout. But he warned it had made Britain’s electoral system vulnerable to fraud on ‘an industrial scale’.

He told Radio 4’s File on 4 program that in one case last year he had come across 14 different ways in which postal votes can be manipulated.

Mr Mawrey presided over a notorious 2004 ballot-rigging case in Birmingham which uncovered evidence of abuse he said would ‘disgrace a banana republic’.

Yesterday he added: ‘What has worried me about this for some time is the ease with which is it possible to commit postal vote fraud and the scale on which it can be committed.

‘In the past when you had personal voting, that is to say voting at polling stations, there was fraud but, frankly, it was minuscule. Postal voting on demand has enabled fraud to be carried out on what, in one case, I described as an industrial scale.'