The chairman of Britain's Electoral Commission has appeared to challenge the Tory leadership's claim that a second-term Blair government could successfully "rig" the question for a future referendum on the euro.
At the same time Mr Sam Younger has acknowledged that new rules designed to encourage postal voting in Thursday's general election may have increased the possibility of vote-rigging.
Speaking to the BBC, Mr Younger said the entire voting system was based on trust and there was a capacity for fraud in all areas. "I think there is a greater possibility of postal vote fraud this time because it is simply easier to get postal votes and there are more postal vote forms floating about," he said.
Promising that the election watchdog would study the system after Thursday's poll, Mr Younger said: "One of the things we will have to look at very carefully after the election is the balance between the encouragement of participation on one hand, represented by voting on postal demand, and the dangers of any increase in fraud on the other."
His comments came on the back of a report in the Mail on Sunday of "fears of wide-scale fraud involving tens of thousands of votes across the country". According to the report in one key Hertfordshire constituency more than half the expected total vote had been cast by post following a campaign by the Labour-run Council.
It quoted Mr George Smith, chairman of the Association of Electoral Administrators, as saying: "We need an urgent inquiry into what has gone wrong. We also need to look at whether any one political party has benefited unduly."
Mr Smith said: "We are concerned at the wide variations of the numbers of postal votes between different constituencies which range from 5 per cent to 35 per cent . . . The risk with postal voting was very small in the past because of the small numbers involved. But now that risk has gone up and up and up because more people are voting by post."
The experts voiced their fears after an investigation by the newspaper revealed that 25,000 people in Stevenage - out of an electorate of 70,000, of whom between 60 and 70 per cent would be expected to vote - had already cast their postal votes.
Conservative vice chairman Mr Tim Collins, whose party is targeting the Hertfordshire seat, described the situation as "staggering" and said postal voting on such a scale "opens the way to ballot-rigging".
Mr Younger also said yesterday his commission would look at the "fairness" of any question for a euro referendum. "I think we've got to comment on the fairness and I think because we are going to be in a position to comment on the fairness - and because so many other people are going to be looking very closely at the wording of any referendum question - I think it would be very difficult in the end to get a question that was genuinely loaded," he said.
The Archbishop of York yesterday warned that a Labour landslide would damage British democracy. Dr David Hope said: "A real democracy needs a healthy opposition. Lord Acton's dictum that absolute power corrupts absolutely holds good today."
In an interview published on the Sunday Times web site, the Archbishop accused politicians of failing to engage with the public during the campaign. He said: "I think people have felt that the campaign has not touched real life issues for them . . . "
The Archbishop also hit out at a "general lack of serious attentiveness" to the foot-and-mouth situation in the north of England.