Nigel Farage has said there needs to be a review into the way postal votes were collected in the Rochdale by-election after it emerged that almost half of all votes cast came through that method.
Express.co.uk has found out that 13,460 postal votes were cast in the Rochdale by-election, 43.2 percent of the votes cast and more than 12,335 received by winner George Galloway.
The number of postal votes was up by 27 percent from the General Election in 2019 when 10,573 were cast.
Added to that the proportion of postal votes in the by-election was up from 22.7 percent in the 2019 general election in Rochdale to 43.2 percent in the by-election.
In a hotly contested by-election, where far left Workers Party candidate George Galloway had a comfortable win, Mr Farage has expressed concerns about the impact of postal voting.
He told Express.co.uk: “There is no doubt that Galloway won on the postal vote. Almost half of Rochdale voters cast their vote two weeks ago. We need to know: What methods were used to collect them?”
This is not the first time that Mr Farage has expressed serious concerns about postal voting.
In particular, he has higlighted the 2015 Oldham by-election when UKIP was easily defeated by Labour after a massive postal vote for Labour’s Jim McMahon.
Then the Brexit Party made a formal complaint to the police when postal voting helped Labour win a tightly contested by-election in Peterborough.
While there is no evidence of malpractice in Rochdale, in the past there have been complaints that postal voting can lead to voter harvesting, especially in some minority communities.
Reform’s Simon Danczuk, a former Labour MP for Rochdale, performed badly in the by-election coming sixth.
However, Reform leader has made claims of intimidation by supporters of Mr Galloway.
The newly elected MP has denied the allegations and even claimed that Tice had asked him to stand for Reform, an allegation Mr Tice has also denied.
