Early voting in Coventry made little impact on turnout figures, and cost £4.50 for each ballot that was cast under the experimental arrangements.

Some 3,373 city voters took advantage of the pilot scheme, for the last local elections in May. But it seems two thirds of them would have voted anyway.

The pilot cost £16,000 to run, made up of staff time, computer costs, administration and publicity to tell people about the arrangements.

That works out at 70p per elector across Coventry, or £4.70 if shared among the few thousand who did take part.

About six per cent of people voting in May used the special booths set up in the city the week before as part of a Government initiative to increase interest in local elections and improve turnout.

The traditional method of voting, where people go to their local polling booth, cost 60p for each vote cast this time.

While Labour retained its grip on control at the Council House, it lost ground to the Conservatives who won seven seats, where turnout was up slightly in most of those wards.

It also lost a seat each to the Liberal Democrats and the Socialist Alliance, but the number of people voting in those wards fell.

Dennis Folkard, from the council’s city secretary department, said:

“The first and most important conclusion to be drawn from the pilot is that it made very little difference to the turnout.

“By any standards, the polling stations represented a convenient, easy to use, alternative to traditional polling arrangements.

“Over the four days, especially the Saturday, many thousands of electors passed within a few yards of the polling stations, only a very small minority of whom decided to take advantage of the facility.

“Convenient access to a polling station would therefore appear not to be a decisive factor for a significant proportion of the electorate in determining whether they will vote in local elections.”

Turnout across the city was 26.5 per cent of those on the electoral roll - down 0.1 per cent on the elections 12 months before that.

In Cheylesmore ward, nine per cent (281 people) voted early in the trial, making it the most receptive area to the scheme. But in Foleshill, that figure fell to just two per cent with only 61 voters using the early voting system.

Across the city, some 56,058 residents (94 per cent) used the normal Thursday ballot box, compared to the six per cent who took advantage of the new system and voted the week before.

The council has to send its comments to the Home Office as part of the feedback on the trials.