Others will be real people but will have no idea that they voted – their postal votes will have been stolen by unscrupulous fixers and used without their knowledge.

In some places, the number of phoney votes may be enough to swing a council seat or even change control of a local council. But the postal vote fraudsters will not be discovered unless they are exceptionally blatant or stupid.

If there is a tight race with a high number of postal votes, local people will never be sure that their council has been fairly elected – concerns borne out by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust which said yesterday that the UK's voting system is vulnerable to large-scale fraud.

Last month, Britain's election commissioner, Judge Richard Mawrey QC, denounced our postal voting system, which allows postal votes to be issued on demand. He said that it makes "wholesale electoral fraud both easy and profitable" and called it "lethal to the democratic process". He was sentencing a disgraced Conservative councillor in Slough.

Three years earlier, the same judge said that electoral fraud in Birmingham "would disgrace a banana republic". As if to rub home that comment, the Council of Europe has threatened to send election monitors to Britain.

Responding to the Birmingham fraud, Parliament passed the Electoral Registration Act in 2006. It introduced the elementary safeguard of making people sign applications for postal votes and give their date of birth. But the judge in the Slough case said that these safeguards had proved completely inadequate.

Even if postal voting were not tainted by fraud, it is still a rotten way for people to vote in a democracy, unless of course they are infirm or otherwise unable to reach a polling station. The same is true of online voting or text voting – two other nostrums peddled by the Government under the pretence of modernising democracy and increasing voter turnout.

For a start, these methods of voting make a nonsense of the secret ballot – one of the jewels of British democracy, achieved after years of agitation in 1872.

When people vote in a polling station, their privacy is guaranteed and protected. No one need be pressured or intimidated at the moment of voting. This essential protection is removed when people vote by post, or online, or by text. They may be coerced and they may have their vote used by others, and that will never be discovered unless they are brave enough to complain.

Voting by post also encourages a passive form of voting. So do online and text voting. Perhaps that is why the political parties like these systems so much. People can choose a new council for their community or a new government for their country in an instant, with less trouble than ordering from a mail catalogue.

Going to a polling station sets voting apart from ordinary life. It makes people aware that they are making a special and important decision.

The process gives them a little time to reflect on that decision, right up to the moment of voting. It also gives them a physical reminder that they are part of a local community. For many city dwellers, going to a polling station may be the only time that they visit a local school or community centre.

Politicians are under the illusion that the answer to voter apathy is to make voting more convenient. Voter apathy has much deeper causes. It is the result of a growing feeling that the outcome of local or national elections makes very little difference to people's lives. It also reflects increasing alienation of voters from politicians as a class.

There is an ever-growing belief that all politicians of all parties are out-of-touch, self-interested and unwilling to accept the same standards of conduct that they constantly preach at voters. The belief may be unfair: most British politicians are hard-working and principled and notably more honest than in most other countries.

But it is constantly nourished, not just by stories of individual sleaze and scandal, but by the depressingly low quality of the everyday language and drama of British politics – an unending barrage of posturing, point-scoring, spin, manipulation and sheer hokum which has left voters bored and angry.

If politicians want people to vote, they should address the causes of apathy and disenchantment. They should make voting worthwhile – not cheapen and devalue the voting process.

When people really believe in democracy – in East Europe after the end of communism, in South Africa after the end of apartheid, and yes, in Iraq after the ejection of Saddam Hussein – they do not care if voting is slow and inconvenient.

They line up for hours, in extreme weather, to get to a polling station and cast their vote. Britain's politicians should try to make us care for our democracy in the same way.

Of course they should clean up the abuses of postal voting highlighted by Judge Mawrey. But much more important, they should clean up their own behaviour, and elevate the whole language and conduct of British politics.


Richard Heller is a political commentator and former adviser to Denis Healey.