Tower Hamlets Vote Fraud posted by Richard Seymour

Just on BBC News this lunchtime was a story about thousands of voters being denied their postal voting ballots in Tower Hamlets - that is, thousands of voters have applied for them and not received them, and the suspicion is obviously that someone is using them to bump up their party's support, mainly the Liberal Democrats. What appears to have happened is that voters were persuaded to sign forms which they were not told would actually lead to their postal ballots being diverted to a third-party address. This was brought to the attention of electoral officials by Respect, and Special Branch are now investigating.

Another area where vote-rigging appears to have been going on is Birmingham, where Labour councillors have a history of this kind of corruption. But again, it may be the Yellow Tories behind it. A fifty year old woman was arrested and released on bail after having been found with a stash of postal ballots. Entirely coincidentally, she is the wife of a Liberal Democrat candidate.

We've seen this before: in the general election last year, two Birmingham council officials were found to have stuffed 1000 postal ballots into a sealed box; Oona King encouraged constituents to send postal ballots to - where else? - her constituency office; and it was discovered that there were many 'ghost voters' in Bethnal Green & Bow, not least in premises owned by a Mr Salique, a restauranteur who had a large, glowing portrait of Oona King on the wall of his Hanbury Street outlet, as well as a framed letter from the Prime Minister promising to read a book he had written. It became so bad that international observers were brought in to oversee the elections in Birmingham and Bethnal Green & Bow.

Also worth posting here is the news that Respect candidates in Wapping have just won a victory in court against the Tower Hamlets returning officer, who had excluded them from the ballot on a technicality - which the judge said was an abuse of power. The vote in that ward has been suspended and a bye-election will be held some time after May 4th, which is very bad news for Labour.

Update: More details here. Turns out there's also a whole tower block in the Limehouse ward full of people who have been registered for postal votes despite the fact that most of them did not request one.