Difficult though this may prove, there is a second even larger problem with the way elections are conducted in our country. Voting fraud is facilitated by a combination of two things: an outdated and wholly inefficient system of voter registration and the system introduced in 2001 of postal voting on demand.

Richard Mawrey QC, the lawyer who has been the judge in most of the major election petitions of recent years, has made clear that the evidence presented in court indicates that voting fraud at the polls is risky and therefore practised on a minuscule scale. This is because it requires pretending that the person casting the ballot is someone else. By contrast, as he declared in his judgment in the Slough case in 2007, “Postal voting on demand . . . put the roll-stuffers in business in a big way.” Moreover, “Postal voting on demand, however many safeguards you build into it, is wide open to fraud. And that it’s open to fraud on a scale that will make election rigging a possibility — and indeed, in some areas, a probability.”

In spite of this, both Labour and the Conservatives are by now so wedded to the system of postal voting on demand that there seems little prospect that it will be abandoned. The most that can be hoped for is the introduction of partial safeguards.

Inaccurate voter rolls also facilitate fraud. By 2014, there were a staggering 15 million errors on the UK registers — some 6.5 million names were incorrectly included and 8.5 million were omitted. It is no coincidence that the other countries which have witnessed voting wars are also countries with highly deficient voting rolls. Why are democracies in Western Europe, in other respects so inferior in their democratic structures and traditions, so much more efficient in registering electors?

The simple answer is that they have consolidated civilian registers which are used for a variety of purposes. Most of these countries also have a system of identity cards. For the English-speaking democracies, this smacks of Big Brother. But in an era where supermarkets record the minutiae of shoppers’ habits, surely the time has arrived to put the case for a civilian population register onto the agenda of political debate in Britain. There are, of course, a number of partial measures to improve the efficiency of our electoral management. In the short run, these may have to suffice.