UNNERVED by the rising support among the electorate in recent years for the fictional Apathy Partythe government has made next week's general and local elections a test of the ability of parties to attract stay-away voters back to the ballot box.

For having earlier toyed with ideas for polling stations in shopping centres and supermarkets and the introduction of electronic voting, it has unleashed the anti-apathy weapon of postal votes for all who want them.

But now indications in East Lancashire are that the issue will be not so much whether there will be an increase in the proportion bothering to vote -- often as low as 30 per cent in local elections and falling by seven points to 71 per cent in the last general election -- but whether those seeking postal votes actually get them.

For, encouraged by an intensive advertising campaign and by letters sent to every resident by the council, the response in Blackburn and Darwen has been enormous. More than 12,000 of the borough's voters have applied for postal votes compared with just 1,000 at the last general election.

But if the expensive exhortation exercise of writing to everyone to offer them a postal vote has proved a successful counter to apathy, it looks like the back-up procedure may well let large numbers down. For with the polls less than a week away, many applicants have not received postal ballot papers and, in particular, people going away on holiday this weekend may not get a vote at all.

It may be that in being more zealous that other councils in promoting post voting, Blackburn with Darwen has miscalculated the response and has been swamped. It has the excuse that because this was a first-time exercise, the volume of postal ballot papers to be processed could only be guessed at -- but that will be of little comfort to people encouraged to use their vote and who lose it through no fault of their own.

It may be that postal voting has been shown to be popular, but lessons must be learned so that no-one is ever disappointed by it next time.