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		Postal ballots - Euro electoral system manipulation Friday, 23 January 2004 The Labour Government has announced its plans to extend postal voting in the European Elections. The regions where all-postal ballots will be held are Yorkshire and the Humber, the North West, the North East and the East Midlands regions. This decision goes against advice by the Electoral Commission. On the basis of a thorough and comprehensive consultation exercise, the Commission recommended in December 2003 that all-postal ballots should be held only in the North East and the East Midlands. This announcement follows three other decisions made by the Labour Government on the European electoral system. •   The 2004 local and London elections were postponed so that they would take place on the same day as the European elections. This will make a proper debate about the issues at stake in each election much harder. •   In light of EU enlargement, the number of seats in the European Parliament has been reduced. The Electoral Commission recommended using electoral roll figures to decide which regions to remove seats from, but the Government has used out-of-date figures to ensure that the new seat distribution will be to its own advantage. •   The Government has announced that the votes cast in the 2004 European elections would be counted in local authority areas. In the last election, they were counted by Westminster constituencies. This will make it difficult to see how the voting patterns would have affected seats in a General Election. East Midlands Conservative MEP, Roger Helmer, said: "This is the latest in a long line of the Labour Party's political manipulation of the European electoral system. The Government has overruled its own independent Electoral Commission and disregarded the views of the other main political parties. The Government has continually tampered with the electoral system in its own narrow interest. It has chosen four regions where it judges an all-postal ballot will be most likely to benefit the Labour Party, not the electorate. This gerrymandering of the electoral system is unacceptable."