Up to 15,000 fraudulent ballots and voter intimidation at 40 polls in Tower Hamlets council and mayoral elections, court told

From the Daily Mail and Breitbart London

As many as 15,000 fraudulent votes helped Lutfur Rahman win re-election in Tower Hamlets last year, it was claimed in court yesterday. The independent mayor of the east London borough faces allegations of ‘electoral fraud’ at the High Court, where his accusers today claimed forgery and bullying helped him at the polls.

Local activist Andy Erlam, one of a group of four voters taking action against Mr Rahman, claimed police stood by as voters faced intimation in at least 40 polling stations in the borough. The group wants election commissioner Richard Mawrey – who is sitting as a judge at an Election Court trial in London – to declare the result of the May 2014 election void and order a re-run.

Statistics showed that nearly 240,000 people live in the Tower Hamlets borough and the mayoral election had around 180,000 registered electors, Mr Erlam told the court.

He said his ‘guesstimate’ was that a total of 10,000 to 15,000 votes in the combined 2014 local council and mayor elections in Tower Hamlets had been forged or affected by intimidation. He told Mr Mawrey he thought there had been ‘intimidation of voters’ at more than 40 polling stations.

He said there was evidence that police at many, if not most, of those polling stations had either ‘refused’ to intervene or taken ‘exceptionally ineffective measures’ to stop intimidation.

Robert Radley, senior consultant at the Radley Forensic Document Laboratory, examined ballot papers and postal voting slips to analyse handwriting and ink. His report claimed “there appears to be a particular feature of note”, which was that many of the X marks had been extended and they were “shaky”. He claimed this was unusual, and as so many ballots were similar it is likely the same person filled them out

He continued: “I have examined many hundreds of ballot papers in a variety of cases over the last 37 years. I do not recall this particular feature in such quantities in previous cases especially when one considers that this feature is found in approximately 25 per cent of the ballot papers for one ward in this particular case. For this to happen by chance would, in my opinion, have to be a very considerable coincidence.”

The Times reports that Mr Radley also looked at the ink used on the ballot papers, and concluded that many of them were the same formula. He wrote: “Bearing in mind that there are many thousands of black and blue ballpoint pen ink formulations, one can appreciate that for a substantial number of ballot papers to contain inks which cannot be differentiated from the extensive examinations undertaken, there has to be a very high level of coincidence for such numbers of indistinguishable inks to appear if, indeed, these ballot papers have been written with different pens in different households.”