ARTHUR Holmes (Soapbox, April 8) is quite entitled to doubt whether the Saturday voting experiment in Blackburn and Darwen will achieve its objective of increasing voter turnout.

He is not entitled to suggest that it is, in some way, an act of gerrymandering designed to benefit the Labour Party.

It is, in fact, part of a national approach -- adopted with all party agreement in the House of Commons -- aimed at trying to stop the decline in turnout by making voting easier.

In all, 38 experiments are being tried throughout the country, including entirely postal voting; easier access to postal votes; polls open for longer hours; mobile polling facilities and electronic voting.

Blackburn with Darwen Council agreed to try out Saturday voting to see whether the presence of polling stations in the two shopping centres would encourage voting more than the usual, often hard to access, polling stations.

If by chance these two polling stations are overrun by eager voters, it could be argued that the experiment has been a success, although I don't expect Mr Holmes to agree. His attempts to talk up the practical difficulties of the experiment are unnecessarily alarmist -- voters will be subject to the same controls on Saturday April 29 as they will be on Thursday May 4, and anyone who has cast a vote on Saturday will be crossed off the list used by the presiding officers on the Thursday, as currently happens with voters who have postal or proxy votes.

For a variety of reasons, the current, long-established voting procedures are not working as well as they once did and, as custodians of the democratic process, it would be wrong of the government to ignore that fact.

It is, therefore, very disappointing that a well meaning experiment is being criticised before it has even been tried, but, given that the Tories have traditionally been the opponents of all advances in social progress, I suppose it isn't surprising.

PHIL RILEY (Secretary, Blackburn Labour Party), Pleckgate Road, Blackburn.