TOWN hall bosses are to hold an internal investigation to discover why thousands of ballot papers failed to reach voters in the local and European postal elections.

As part of the review, the Returning Officer, Bernard Knight, will meet with Royal Mail bosses to try and work out what went wrong.

So far both parties have blamed each other for the problems which led to emergency polling station being set up just days before the close of the ballot.

News of the inquiry comes as councillors and a Bolton MP demanded the Government reverse its decision to use postal voting in October's referendum on a regional assembly. Brian Iddon, MP for Bolton South-east, said: "I want to know what happened to all these missing ballot papers before postal voting is used again.

"Something went badly wrong and it appears as if both the Royal Mail and the council made mistakes."

Council chiefs today revealed that they have agreed to hold their own inquiry into who was to blame for the fiasco.

Conservative leader Cllr Alan Rushton welcomed the investigation.

But he added: "Until an evaluation has been carried out into the problems, we should not even consider using postal voting again."

Cllr Barbara Ronson, leader of the Liberal Democrats, said she could not be confident a "democratic outcome" could be achieved by the use of postal voting at the autumn ballot.

"We still do not know what went wrong because the council is blaming the Royal Mail and the Royal Mail is blaming the council," she said.

But Labour leader Cllr Cliff Morris described the failings of the ballot as "teething problems".

He said: "We need a full report from the elections officer into what went wrong to see what lessons can be learnt."

Four emergency polling booths had to be set up in Rumworth, Hulton and Westhoughton just days before the elections because thousands of voters were still without ballot papers.

About 42 per cent of votes were returned in the election -- matching last year's ballot by post and bettering the 32 per cent turnout of 2002 when polling stations were in use.

The Electoral Commission is to hold its own review of postal voting in the borough as part of a report on the pilot schemes held across the North-west.

A council spokesman said: "The internal review has already begun and, as part of this, Bernard Knight, the Returning Officer, has invited the Royal Mail to a meeting. All of this will feed into the review being undertaken by the Electoral Commission."

MPs yesterday discussed the postal voting experiment in a debate in the House of Commons.

Afterwards Bolton West MP, Ruth Kelly, said: "The turnout in the postal vote had increased. As these were pilot schemes, it is right that time should be given for the Commission to come to its conclusions."