The online blindspot in the fight against electoral fraud is proving an impossible nut to crack

Despite the Electoral Commission recommending a change to existing rules in 2003, nothing has happened. That really is an extraordinary dereliction of duty

Who doesn’t get a teeny bit excited when the post comes through the letter box? A birthday card, perhaps; or notification of a big, £25 win on the premium bonds. True, it could be a bill, but if you’re really lucky you might see a political leaflet on the door mat.

There, staring up at you, will be the smiling face of your local MP, who has a message for you about how hard he’s working to make sure there is plenty of affordable housing for everyone – but how’s he’s working even harder to ensure it’s not built in his constituency.

Or it might be your local council candidates, keen to explain how they’ll transform the local playground if only you vote Labour at the polls. And to hammer home the point, here’s a picture of them – Graham and Jill – pointing at a moderately misaligned swing with a mixture of outrage and compassion. If they don’t get elected, they might still be in with a sniff for a Bafta.

Sometimes, the literature will be spikier than you expect, such as when a Conservative candidate in Dudley last year said: “What have Labour delivered to this ward? Hepatitis.” Or how about the Labour leaflet which listed among Conservative priorities: “Shitting on us.”

Good or bad though, at least the provenance of these leaflets – typos, smears, false promises and all – has to be made clear. You know who they’re from; and you can be pretty confident that they’re financing is sufficiently transparent to be subject to Electoral Commission oversight.

This isn’t true of online political advertising. Despite the Electoral Commission having recommended as long ago as 2003 a change to existing rules to bring them into the digital age, the government has still not acted to get a grip on the situation. That really is an extraordinary dereliction of duty.

Whether that changes in the immediate future remains unclear. While pressure to regulate various corners of the internet continues to grow, democratic governments around the world retain their traditional anxiety about both the principle and practice.

With politicians flailing, big tech firms – not immune to public and political pressure – have taken matters into their own hands to some extent, accepting belatedly that they have a responsibility to protect the public from such diverse evils as hate speech and political manipulation.

Facebook now requires that individuals and groups provide verifiable, publicly-available contact details before they can run political campaigns. And in the run-up to the European Parliament elections, the social media giant has set up a new team at its HQ in Dublin which hopes to spot (and take down) attempted political misinformation.

This is all to the good of course, although it begs the question of how Facebook might reach decisions about which material to remove from its pages, and whether appeals will be possible before or after content has been taken down. There is an innate irony in systems of oversight which aim to improve transparency being themselves pretty opaque.

In any event, there are broader questions which will not – and cannot – be dealt with by the initiatives of companies even of the size of Facebook or Google.

After the Brexit referendum, the Electoral Commission’s adverse findings against Vote Leave and Leave.EU and (at the less serious end of the scale) the official Remain campaign suggest either that current spending rules are not understood or that breaches – leading to fines in the tens of thousands of pounds – are not punished in a way that deters wrongdoing.

And the ability of rich individuals to use networks of offshore financial arrangements means that the origins of their money are difficult to examine – even if the money is then used properly for legitimate campaigning.

Add to this mix the already very different resources available to different political parties and it becomes clear that Facebook’s team of 40 people monitoring attempts to deceive Europe’s voting public will be able to do little more than tinker at the edges.

In fact, there is always a danger that we are blinded by the potential dangers of the odd Russian bot, or obvious piece of online “fake news” (the impact of which remains uncertain), and ignore what is staring us in the face: real, breathing politicians, with real – if opaque – sources of wealth, saying in the flesh things that are wrong, threatening or that incite hatred.