More from the London Sunday Times:

“Welcome to the banana republic of Blackburn, the northern town where, according to one parliamentary candidate, citizens’ votes are no longer their own. This week Craig Murray, a former diplomat hoping to become the local MP, will be writing to the Electoral Commission to raise his fears of vote-rigging in the constituency. The soaring numbers of people voting by post, he said, are leaving the election wide open to fraud. “I’ve been approached by several people in the Asian community who are under huge pressure from Labour activists to apply for a postal vote rather than a ballot vote and then hand their postal vote over to the Labour party,” he said. “That is happening now in Blackburn on a wide scale. In my career as a diplomat I’ve been used to precisely this situation abroad but wasn’t expecting to face it in the UK.”

In Blackburn the contest is particularly tense. The sitting MP is Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and the local Muslim community is threatening to vote him out in protest over the Iraq war. In its efforts to hang on to every vote it can, Labour is urging people to register for postal votes; already 50% more people than in 2001 will be using the system in Blackburn this time. Many of them, claimed Murray, are facing pressure or even threats of “repercussions” intended to influence who they support. The allegations in Blackburn are by no means isolated. The British electoral system, once the envy of the world, is under unprecedented fire…The police are also conducting investigations in Woking, Burnley, Reading, Peterborough, Oldham, Bradford and Halton.

Critics blame the scandal on Labour’s changes to the system, which now allows anyone to ask for a postal vote. Thrown on the defensive last week Tony Blair insisted: “Overall, the postal voting system is no more prone to fraud than other electoral systems….” The loopholes were all too clear to Labour activists in Birmingham during the local elections last year. Some candidates for the council had obtained thousands of blank postal voting forms and set up a secret fraud factory in a warehouse. Corrupt postmen handed over sacks of postal ballots to Labour candidates, tricked voters into parting with blank forms and paid small boys to steal postal ballots from letterboxes.”

Don’t worry Tony, I’m sure that you can persuade Jimmy Carter to testify that the election was ‘free and fair,” and the BBC can probably be relied upon not to say too much.

Looks like a job for the British blogosphere to me.