Lutfur Rahman, Mayor of Tower Hamlets Photo: Rex  The problems go deep – despite years of warnings of misconduct in Tower Hamlets, the state watchdogs gave the borough’s electoral system a gold-star rating for integrity in inspection reports. We still have a series of tick-box inspections of town hall returning officers that are as ineffectual and useless as those once practised by the now-abolished Audit Commission.  As a minister, I found within Whitehall a complete reluctance by officials to take action on the warnings from local councillors and journalists of systematic corruption in the Tower Hamlets mayoral administration. Yet when I subsequently sent forensic investigators into Tower Hamlets, they quickly found shocking financial irregularities. These were only the tip of the iceberg – further cases of alleged planning irregularities and financial misconduct couldn’t be followed up due to documents disappearing or written records not being kept.  I believe electoral malpractice is far more common than just one isolated London borough. But there is a collective state of denial: if you don’t bother to lift the rock, you won’t see what’s crawling underneath. The respected anti-corruption expert, Dr Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, last year estimated that there were 6.5 million “ghost voters” on our electoral registers – those who have moved, died, or were mistakenly or fraudulently entered on to the register. Insufficient checks are made to ensure voters are genuine. If a town hall can demand identification to borrow a library book, it’s not beyond the wit of officialdom for the same body to check when someone casts a vote at a polling station.  A police officer outside a polling station in Tower Hamlets Photo: Yui Mok/PA  Despite the fact that there are London elections next year, a sizeable minority of those voters signed up in Tower Hamlets remain unverified and could be fakes. In Hackney, the situation is even worse, with almost a quarter of the electorate unverified and potentially non-existent. We urgently need to clean up these registers. Across the country, electors from abroad are not properly checked to ensure that they qualify to vote when they register. Fraudulent registration is frequently tied to illegal immigration, as illegal migrants sign up to make it easier to get credit or a mobile phone. Such illegality feeds through to further crimes, such as benefit and housing fraud.  The new Conservative Government is no longer prepared to turn a blind eye to Britain’s modern-day rotten boroughs. I welcome the recent action of the new Cabinet Office Minister, John Penrose, to accelerate the introduction of individual registration and remove phantom voters. Over the next few months, I will be gathering evidence before reporting to the Prime Minister on what further steps are necessary to stamp out voter registration fraud and error; postal voting fraud; impersonation; bribery; and undue influence and intimidation.  Our nation has a proud heritage as the mother of Parliaments, yet the worrying and covert spread of electoral fraud threatens that reputation. While all politicians want high turnouts, we cannot sacrifice integrity and confidence in our democracy through misplaced political correctness or woolly concerns over “political engagement”. It is time to awake from our state of denial and take action against the electoral crooks who threaten our elections. British democracy should not be reduced to the level of a phone vote in an X Factor contest: “vote early, vote often” is the problem, not the solution.  Sir Eric Pickles is the Government’s Anti-Corruption Champion and former Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government
This Government will take action against the crooks who threaten the integrity   of our democratic system