International observers worried about OUR postal voting being open to fraud

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Officials from the Warsaw-based Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights said they had "serious concerns" that the upcoming local and mayoral elections would be tainted by ballot-rigging.

The watchdog's intervention puts pressure on ministers to reform postal voting.

After the 2005 general election, the ODIHR, which has monitored polls in countries accused of ballot box fraud such as Russia, Ukraine and Serbia, warned that candidates in Britain could exploit the system by "harvesting" applications for postal votes.

People must be asked to explain why they wanted to vote by post and provide details such as National Insurance numbers, the ODIHR said.

This system, which operates in Northern Ireland, would minimise the risk of postal votes being stolen.

A spokesman for the watchdog said last night: "The recommendations we made in the report remain valid. If the message has not been taken, we would have serious concerns that there will be problems again."

The ODIHR reinforced its message after a judge warned that politicians' failure to act after past scandals was "lethal to the democratic process".

On Tuesday, Richard Mawrey QC convicted a Tory councillor of carrying out a postal vote fraud to ensure he was voted into office.

Vote rigging: A threat to democracy

Eshaq Khan and his electoral team created hundreds of false names in the run-up to last year's elections and entered them on the electoral roll.

They then made postal vote applications for these "ghost voters" and used the ballots to back Mr Khan.

Mr Mawrey said the guilty verdict showed that fraud was now "both easy and profitable".

The judge, who in 2005 said some ballots in the UK would "disgrace a banana republic", said that vote rigging was still "childishly simple to commit and very difficult to detect".

Before 2000, to get a postal ballot voters had to show why they could not attend in person.

Now the law allows anyone to obtain one - they just have to provide a name, address, date of birth and and a signature.

John Turner, chief executive of the Association of Electoral Administrators, said: "Until we sharpen the system up to make the people voting prove they are who they purport to be, it will be open to fraud."