I see eagle-eyed Lib Dem MP John Hemming has posted on his blog this morning. John is very keen, to the point of obsession, on the issue postal vote fraud and he has covered events in Birmingham in some great detail in recent years.

I am indebted to Iain Dale for pointing me in the direction of this piece from the Birmingham Post yesterday, which appears to have evaded the attention of Mr Hemming. So, as I know he reads this blog, I'll give him the details:

A local election candidate arrested in a major electoral fraud inquiry is to be charged with forgery. Mohammed Khan, aged 54, of Hob Moor Road, Small Heath,Birmingham, will be summoned to court this week to face 11 counts of forgery.

He is one of several people at the centre of an investigation into alleged postal vote fraud during the 2006 Birmingham local elections. In April 2006, Mr Khan was arrested and bailed by West Midlands Police detectives working for the economic crime team on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud the election process. A day earlier, his wife Naseem Akhtar had been arrested following the discovery of a number of postal voting forms at an address in Ronald Road, Bordesley Green. Last year, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) advised the police that fraud charges against a number of individuals including Mr Khan could be brought. A spokeswoman said: "Our lawyers have been considering this case for some months and this week we advised West Midlands Police of our decision."

Of course, Hemming has been very selective in his quoting of allegations of postal voting fraud stories in the past and strangely, it is usually the Lib Dem ones he manages to miss. Well, feel free to use this one in your crusade, John.

Oh... just before I go.... Iain Dale, like the Liberal Democrat he was referring to in his piece, makes much opportunistic political comment play of Labour's introduction of postal voting on a more widespread basis as being an encouragement to fraud. Well, on the subject of selective quoting, I notice that Iain Dale rather perversely omitted to include this bit from yesterday's Birmingham Post story:

Meanwhile, a Birmingham man was found guilty of rigging votes in a Coventry Council election last week.

Iftikar Hussain, 31, the cousin of Tory councillor Altaf Adalat, denied using the identities of two other people to place fraudulent votes in the Foleshill Ward election on May 4, 2006. Councillor Adalat won the ward by six votes.

A jury at Birmingham Crown Court took just over an hour to unanimously agree that Hussain was guilty on two counts of personation.

During the trial, the jury heard that he used the identities of Abdul Khaliq and Mukhtar Hussain, who were not in the UK at the time. Hussain is due to be on February 1.

Personation is nothing to do with postal voting, but is about people going in to the polling station and pretending to be someone else. Perhaps the Tories were happier with their old corrupt method of fiddling elections, eh?