In 2005, a British high court judge stunned the nation by pointing to “electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic” in the city of Birmingham. It turned out that a group of men, mainly of Kashmiri origin, had been running an industrial-scale scam to return bogus postal votes.

That phrase “banana republic” stuck in my mind. I have been an election observer in Nicaragua and Ecuador, two republics that depend on bananas. What happened in Birmingham — and has since happened in Bradford, East London, and elsewhere — would be impossible in either of those banana republics, since both require voters to present a form of photographic ID known as a cédula.