On Thursday, a majority of the country will have an opportunity to vote in England, Scotland and Wales. The electors concerned will cast their votes in a manner that has not changed much since the secret ballot was introduced in 1872. They will walk into a polling station, declare their name and address and then be handed a voting paper. Their identity is taken on trust. It is admirably simple but it is not an especially secure procedure.

In the overwhelming majority of instances, of course, no fraud has been permitted. Yet by international democratic standards, the method long employed in this country is anachronistic. It is not the sort of formula that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office would recommend to an emerging democracy. There is, furthermore, increasing evidence of electoral malpractice of various types being uncovered here. It has been the instinct of politicians and electoral administrators alike to consider voting in Britain to be inherently “clean”. That is now too complacent an attitude. The case for asking that voters produce individual photographic identification to confirm who they are is now compelling.

This seems to be the view too of Sam Younger, the chairman of the Electoral Commission. In his interview with The Times today he concedes that the integrity of the electoral process has been questioned and that deterring fraud by imposing new measures is preferable to the enormously labour intensive business of trying to investigate malpractice later.

Much of the recent damage to the credibility of British elections had been needlessly self-inflicted. Ministers were rash in the extreme to liberalise the rules surrounding postal ballots without tightening the security of these arrangements. They are still reluctant to make these procedures as watertight as they should be. And there has been insufficient vigour in examining the wider issue of identification. The Government offers the sense that it would prefer a flawed election to one that might involve more intense obligations on voters who are already reluctant to vote in the current lax fashion.

This will not do. Low turnouts might devalue a democracy but election results that could be dubious are much more corrosive. Nor is there any reason to conclude that asking electors to bring along photographic identification will dissuade a swath of citizens from participating. In Northern Ireland, where it was once said waspishly that being dead was no barrier to exercising the franchise, identification has been the norm for years without the slightest sign either that voters object to this burden or that they will not venture to polling stations because of it. By contrast, as a rule, turnout is higher in the Province than the rest of the United Kingdom. Most voters would consider it common sense that they be asked to provide some basic information as to who they are.

While Mr Younger is right to raise his concerns, the Electoral Commission does not have the unilateral authority to impose its preferences on the Government. It should not, nevertheless, be shy about making its voice heard nor afraid of embarrassing Whitehall. If it had been more vociferous over postal ballots, the subsequent, entirely predictable fiasco might have been averted. The commission (and ministers) should be less intrigued by technological novelties, such as electronic voting, and more concerned about ensuring that the basics of the familiar system are executed competently. All who are entitled to vote on Thursday should take the chance to do so. But it should be the last time when they do not have to prove who they are.