As businessman Ali Mir stepped into a polling station situated in a primary school in South Manchester, the atmosphere was suddenly charged with tension. A commotion erupted as an election clerk raised his voice at a British Pakistani man who had joined his wife in the voting booth.

The man, of robust build, had begun advising his wife on how to fill out her ballot, prompting the clerk to intervene assertively. According to Mr. Mir, who is a wholesale importer and witnessed the scene, the situation quickly escalated.

“They halted him,” Mr. Mir recounted to The Mail on Sunday. The man, defending his actions, explained that his wife was not proficient in English. He insisted he was merely guiding her on where to place her mark on the ballot.

“She can’t read English, so she doesn’t know which candidate is which—I was just helping her,” the man reportedly explained.

However, the clerk at the desk firmly reminded him, “You can’t do that in this country.” The incident highlighted the challenges faced by non-English speakers in navigating the voting process, even as it brought to light the strict regulations surrounding voter assistance in the UK.

‘But the man behind the desk told him: “You can’t do that in this country”.’

Mr Mir had witnessed one of scores of alarming incidents at last month’s Gorton and Denton by-election of ‘family voting’: an illegal practice that often involves a man entering a polling booth with his wife or other relative and telling them how to vote.

The practice – a criminal offence since 2024 – shatters the sanctity of the ‘secret ballot’, which has been a cornerstone of British elections since 1872.

Soon after polls closed, in a highly unusual intervention, the independent election observer group Democracy Volunteers announced it had detected ‘concerningly high levels’ of family voting, with up to one in eight votes affected by the practice.

It followed a bitter election mired in allegations of sectarianism as the Green Party targeted the constituency’s large Muslim population with messages about the war in Gaza and leaflets written entirely in Urdu.

The triumphant Greens branded allegations of cheating as ‘straight out of the Trump playbook’, while Manchester City Council, responsible for overseeing the election, insisted its staff had ‘seen no such issues’ and criticised the observers for not raising the alarm sooner.

But The Mail on Sunday can reveal the illegal behaviour witnessed by Mr Mir is by no means an isolated case. Figures obtained by this newspaper show that at the 2024 General Election, Democracy Volunteers detected family voting in 116 of the 204 constituencies it monitored.

In a quarter of these cases, voters were observed taking ‘clear direction’ from someone else, while more than a third of the cases were described as ‘collusion’ between two or more voters.

And while family voting was seen in seats including Godalming in Surrey, Windsor in Berkshire and Ynys Mon in North Wales as well as inner-city seats, in years past the most egregious examples of vote-rigging have been discovered in areas with large Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities.

This weekend Dr Patrick Nash, a legal academic based in Oxford, warned that voter fraud is being perpetrated on ‘an industrial scale’ across Britain. And it’s not just family voting that threatens to undermine crunch local elections in May, when 5,000 seats across 136 councils and six mayoral posts will be up for grabs.

He raised concerns that postal voting is being abused, that clan-based family networks are delivering Muslim ‘bloc votes’ to their favoured politicians and that candidates are being physically intimidated and harassed on the campaign trail.

Meanwhile, police, town halls and the Electoral Commission, Britain’s election watchdog, are failing to take action because of cultural sensitivities, he claimed.

‘The response from the authorities mirrors what happened during the ongoing grooming gangs scandal,’ he said.

‘Generally speaking, the official attitude is that this isn’t happening here, can’t happen here, every­thing’s fine, nothing to see here.

‘Decades of court judgments, academic studies and international monitoring reports say otherwise. Yet the Electoral Com­mission has been misleading the public for decades on the existence and scale of the corruption, the police have been hopeless and every major political party has sought to benefit from it rather than stamp it out.’

So how did we get here?

Central to claims of voter fraud and manipulation is the so-called ‘biraderi’ system. Imported from Pakistan and Bangladesh, biraderi – or ‘brotherhood’ – politics is based on powerful family networks in which male elders direct clan-based bloc voting.

Before previous elections, some candidates are even believed to have flown to the highly conservative region of Sylhet in Bangladesh or Mirpur, a city in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, to woo elders who would then instruct families in the UK on how to vote.

Experts warn Britain’s system of ‘postal voting by demand’ – introduced by Tony Blair’s Government in 2001 – left it vulnerable to being abused by these influential networks. In 2005 police uncovered a ‘vote-forging factory’ in Birmingham, and six Labour councillors were convicted of stealing up to 3,000 postal votes.

It is alleged that so-called community elders would go house-to-house collecting – or ‘harvesting’ – unsealed postal vote ballots in constituencies in the Midlands and the North. Piles of votes would then be handed over to corrupt party officials.

Speaking to The Mail on Sunday, a 43-year-old businessman in Oldham, who asked to remain anonymous, said that at every election his mother and other members of his family would be hassled by his uncle, a Labour stalwart.

‘He would harass everyone in the family to hand over the postal votes,’ he said. ‘He would put pressure on my mum and that would then go down the chain to the rest of the family. He would also use scaremongering and say that if you don’t vote Labour you are going to lose your benefits. He did it for ten to 15 years. Whenever it comes to election time there are arguments in the house.

‘My sister got fed up and stopped getting a postal vote. I don’t think she even votes any more.’ Postal vote harvesting in the UK is believed to have reduced after political activists were banned from handling or collecting ballot papers in 2024.

In Leeds that year, so concerned was Mothin Ali, now the Green Party’s deputy leader, that he warned on TikTok: ‘Don’t let other people force you to vote one way or the other… we are aware that there are groups trying to take postal votes, fill them in… it’s illegal.’ Mr Ali went on to be elected as a Leeds councillor.

But the ban failed to address the malign pressure that men can still exert on their relatives to vote for their preferred candidate.

Such manipulation still appears rife in Longsight, a deprived ward in South Manchester where 73 per cent of residents are from an ethnic minority, including 36 per cent who are Pakistani.

A 42-year-old father-of-three, who works in a shop near Longsight’s bustling market, said: ‘A lot of Pakistani families vote together – it is common back home.

‘As head of the household I expect my wife to vote the same as me after we agree on it.’

Subway manager Ahmed Subhani, 33, said he saw family voting in a polling station in nearby Levenshulme at the 2023 local elections. ‘A Pakistani man went into the booth with his wife – he was showing her how to vote,’ he said.

‘A member of staff jumped up straight away and said, “No, no. You can’t be in there together”.Families do vote together.’

He added: ‘I talk about it with my wife and we decide as a family who we’re going to vote for. That’s normal.’

Perhaps the most shocking examples of electoral fraud in recent decades have been exposed in Tower Hamlets, East London.

Lutfur Rahman, Britain’s first elected Muslim mayor, was kicked out of office in 2015 after a specialist court concluded that he was guilty of vote-rigging, buying votes and religious intimidation.

Election Commissioner Richard Mawrey KC ruled that Mr Rahman and his cronies stole the previous year’s election by creating an army of ‘ghost voters’, forging postal votes and bribing fellow Muslims with money diverted from other groups.

Strikingly, Mr Mawrey’s findings included illegal ‘undue spiritual influence’, where imams told Bengali Muslim voters it was their religious duty to vote for Mr Rahman and a sin to do otherwise.

Almost 11 years after his disgrace, Mr Rahman is – astonishingly – again the all-powerful mayor of Tower Hamlets, having been re-elected in 2022 after serving a five-year ban from holding public office, the maximum penalty possible.

Concerns about the possibility of voting fraud in the borough remain. An extraordinary video obtained by this newspaper showed a key campaigner working for Mr Rahman apparently urging activists to ‘collect’ ballots from elderly and sick voters ahead of the 2022 election.

Speaking in Bengali during a meeting at a halal steakhouse, Mohammed Abdus Shukur, a professional carer, appeared to urge others to ‘collect’ votes from vulnerable people they care for.

‘In Tower Hamlets there are 3,500 carer brothers and sisters. If 1,000 carer brothers and sisters actively work in this way and if every brother and sister carer collects 20 votes each, then our carers’ 20,000 votes can enter Lutfur’s [ballot] box.’

At the time, the Electoral Commission’s code of conduct said activists ‘should never handle or take any completed ballot paper or postal ballot packs from voters’. The practice was criminalised in 2024. Mr Rahman attended the meeting and while there is no evidence he condoned Mr Shukur’s words, neither did he criticise or clarify them. His spokesman told the MoS that ‘Mr Shukur made no reference to “postal vote collection”’ and as such ‘Mr Rahman believed he meant “support” in general terms’.

Concerns over alleged vote-rigging are not just found in London and the northern towns of what was once Labour’s ‘Red Wall’.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that at the 2017 General Election two highly suspicious events occurred during the battle for the Lincoln constituency. First, in the 24 hours before the May 22 deadline, a huge surge of 1,900 people applied to vote at the election. Two weeks later, the incumbent Tory MP Karl McCartney was defeated by just over 1,500 votes.

‘To have 1,900 applications in the last 24 hours is a phenomenal amount,’ Mr McCartney said.

‘Some 1.5 per cent of the population of Lincoln decided in the last 24 hours to put an application in to join the electoral register. It just doesn’t ring true.’

Second, despite the election being held just outside of term-time, at some University of Lincoln halls of residences turnout was as high as 90 per cent. Such figures fuelled fears that large numbers of polling cards were stolen from student accommodation.

Mr McCartney was even able to identify two students who, according to records, had voted in person but who in fact had posted an Instagram picture of themselves on a beach in Corfu on polling day.

In a bid to combat such alleged fraud, the previous Tory government introduced new laws which mean voters must show photo ID in a polling station before being issued with a ballot paper.

But earlier this month The Mail on Sunday revealed that the Electoral Commission was pushing for the law to be watered down.

It wants the Government to allow the ‘vouching’ of voters who do not have identity documents when they go to a polling station.

It would mean that those without any valid forms of voter ID – such as illegal migrants or others with no right to vote – could vote by simply getting someone else to vouch for them.

To the astonishment of many, the commission claims ‘there is no evidence of large-scale electoral fraud’ in Britain. It stated on its website that of the 1,318 cases of alleged electoral fraud reported to police between 2020 and 2024, eight led to convictions and police issued three cautions.

‘Most cases either resulted in the police taking no further action or were locally resolved by the police issuing words of advice,’ it added.

Critics, however, claim the police are failing to properly investigate allegations of voter fraud.

Former Tory Cabinet minister Lord Pickles – who published a devastating report in 2016 warning that political correctness was leading to a blind eye being turned to widespread voting fraud in Muslim communities – accused the police of being ‘completely indifferent’ to electoral offences.

‘There is a reluctance to prosecute,’ he said. ‘There has to be a lot of public pressure before anything happens.’

In response, Deputy Commissioner Nik Adams of the National Police Chiefs’ Council told the MoS: ‘We will not tolerate criminal activity that undermines our elections… allegations of election fraud are investigated robustly and consistently’.

Meanwhile, Mr Mawrey, Britain’s most experienced Election Court judge, last week warned MPs that Britain’s election laws are not being enforced.

At a little-noticed committee hearing in Westminster, Mr Mawrey said that in the Birmingham and Tower Hamlets cases police had initially been unwilling to act.

He added: ‘Another problem, I’m sorry to say, is the Electoral Commission’s view is that electoral fraud isn’t happening… and therefore there is no impetus from the people who should be enforcing it to actually enforce the law.’

It is a charge the commission rejects. ‘We take electoral fraud seriously, and we act on it,’ a spokesman told the MoS.

‘Ahead of the May elections, we are working closely with the police, local authorities, political parties and returning officers and their teams.’

Those polls, just weeks away, are set to test Britain’s cherished democratic process.

But as Lord Pickles warned last night: ‘There is an enormous amount of flux in the electoral system right now and the more flux there is, the greater the temptation to fiddle.’