Councillors jailed for vote-rigging scam that may have cost Labour control of Hackney

Two councillors were jailed yesterday for a massive vote-rigging scandal that may have cost Labour control of a London authority

Two councillors were jailed yesterday for a massive vote-rigging scandal that may have cost Labour control of a London authority.

Police said the plot in the borough of Hackney by the Conservative Isaac Leibowitz and the Liberal Democrat Zev Lieberman was probably the largest attempt to "subvert the democratic process" yet seen in Britain. Leibowitz, 36, was jailed for six months and Lieberman, 29, for four months after Judge Jeremy Connor said their "enthusiasm for public office" led to fraud and a violation of the election process.

They engineered a 2,000 per cent increase in proxy voting, registered Americans as local voters and tricked pensioners into handing over voting rights. During the nine-week trial, Wood Green Crown Court was told the councillors misled voters between 1994 and the elections in 1998 to gain more votes for the Liberal Democrats.

Non-British citizens, including 88 mainly American Orthodox Jewish students at a religious college, were added to the proxy vote list although they were ineligible to vote.

Pensioners were tricked into handing over proxy voting rights, including one who thought she was signing a petition to have rubbish collected and another who had voted Labour for 57 years but found her vote cast for the Liberal Democrats. The fraud was designed to ensure Lieberman, a school administrator from Stoke Newington, was returned in the Northwold ward.

He and Leibowitz, a child carer from Clapton, were both successful at the election in which the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party won 31 seats to the Labour Party's 29. Labour Party officials complained to the police but, despite an 18-month Special Branch investigation costing an estimated £80,000, police remain uncertain about the full extent of the fraud.

Detective Inspector Robert Garratt, who headed the inquiry, said it was probably the "largest" vote-rigging conspiracy in Britain. "We made attempts to looks for similar occasions but found nothing on this scale," he said.

Judge Connor told the two men, both Orthodox Jews, it was sad their enthusiasm to do "good works for the community" led to an agreement to "cause the violation of the electoral process. It was fraud. No doubt that fraud arose from a clear intention to elect particular councillors, but fraud it was and fraud it was proven to be."

The men were convicted of two counts of forgery and one of conspiracy to defraud.

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