Britain’s electoral law feels like a relic of a vanished pre-digital world. The last time the law was comprehensively revised was in 1983, in the distant days when things like bots, trolls and astroturfing were still unknown. Even then, many of the offences in electoral law related more to the kind of abuses that Charles Dickens described in the Eatanswill election in Pickwick Papers – personation, bribery and intimidation – than to the new digital abuses that increasingly shape 21st-century elections.

In 2016, noting that electoral law had become too “complex, voluminous and fragmented”, the Law Commission proposed reforms to bring it into the modern world. But, citing the pressures of Brexit, Theresa May’s government turned the commission’s ideas down flat. And there electoral law reform still rests, an unaddressed anachronism, a hulk left to rust while trust seeps steadily away from elections and politics.

This week, the Electoral Commission has energised the reform case in a new report on digital campaigning. “Urgent action must be taken” by Britain’s parliaments, governments and social media companies, said the commission’s chair, Sir John Holmes. If that does not happen, he said, the tools that regulate political campaigning – and thus the trustworthiness of the processes – will not be fit for purpose. The implicit verdict is thus that British elections are already unfit to an unacceptable and destructive degree.

The commission’s central concern is that old rules which control printed political messages have no grip on their digital equivalents. Election leaflets tell you who produced them, but digital messages do not. That must change. The ultimate source and financing of digital messages, especially by third parties, is also easily hidden. Fines are too low and reporting requirements too leisurely. Foreign-funded messages are practically impossible to distinguish from domestically funded ones. Already nearly half of the advertising money that is officially reported to the commission goes on digital. The true proportion is certain to be far higher.

The potential for fraud, lies and disproportionate influence is only too obvious. Yet Britain’s politicians, too digitally illiterate, fall all too easily for the complacent belief that our system is unbreakable, honest and world-leading. That’s simply not true. The latest rankings by the global Electoral Integrity Project have the UK next to bottom among western European nations in combating a combination of malpractice, corruption and cyber-insecurity, below Greece and Italy, and above only Malta. Globally, Britain’s electoral integrity ranks well below Tunisia, Costa Rica and Benin, though above the US.

Britain’s election laws need changing. Refusal to recognise the problem and failure to address the digital threats in particular is both culpable and naive. A government that refuses to do this is one that is benefiting from a broken democratic system, with all this entails for future political trust, health and order.