With so much happening on the Scottish political scene the fiasco surrounding the conduct of the Election may seem a secondary matter, perhaps even a distraction. Not so. This is a huge issue that must not be sidelined or glossed over with a Hutton-style whitewash.

The risk is that any investigation conducted by those primarily responsible for this disaster will seek to fudge responsibility and concentrate on the technicalities of the voting process, with a view to recommending improvements next time round. This is unacceptable. The suspicion here is that there was a deliberate attempt to fix the election, an attempt which came within a whisker of success.

The only alternative explanation is that the Westminster Minister responsible, Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander, is unfit for office. Running the Scottish elections is probably the most important function remaining to the old Scottish Office in London and for Mr. Alexander to get this so spectacularly wrong would require his resignation and the end of his political career.

If, on the other hand, it transpires that Mr. Alexander was at the centre of a deliberate attempt to either rig or discredit the Scottish elections then things are dramatically more serious. Rather than simply contemplating a loss of his Cabinet seat Mr. Alexander might be facing criminal charges.

Electoral corruption is possibly the most serious charge any politician can face, on a par with (and in many ways similar to) the accusation of selling seats in the House of Lords. Angus McNeil and his talented research team would be well advised to investigate the relevant legal background.

The scale of the disenfranchisement is immense. Alan Smart of YouScotland estimates that the number of people cheated out of their right to vote, before the polls even opened, through non-delivery of their requested postal votes, could be of the order of 50,000. Depending how the vote deficit is calculated that amounts to 50,000 voters who were denied the opportunity to cast a list vote, a constituency vote and a local government vote, i.e. 150,000 lost votes in total.

This slightly exceeds the more widely publicised number of disallowed votes: 85,643 in the constituencies and 60,464 in the lists. Many of these were doubly disallowed (both constituency and list) so the numbers of individuals concerned are somewhat less. In round terms the total number of individuals disenfranchised was around 150,000 (50,000 postal voters and 100,000 disallowed) and the total of votes “lost” around 300,000.

Nor is this all. Worries persist over the validity of the postal votes actually cast. The vast increase in the number of postal votes at the last Westminster GE has been accompanied by prosecutions for vote-rigging, especially in the inner cities of England. Following remarks by judges to the effect that lax controls over the authenticity of postal votes puts the UK on a par with “banana republics” this has led to the introduction of spot and identity checks – but not in Scotland. Why not?

Any comprehensive inquest into this whole sorry business must address a range of questions. Some are purely technical, such as the effects of ballot paper design (especially those changed at the last moment to accommodate the voting machines) and the confusion arising from having the local elections (using the very different STV voting system) on the same day as the parliamentary poll.

Others relate to the logistics and security aspects of postal voting. (YouScotland claim that the mechanics of postal voting were transferred to the private firm which provided the voting machines. Surely not?)

But the most important question relates to the judgements made within the Scotland Office. Alexander and his officials claim that decisions such as the single ballot paper for both list and constituency votes were agreed with all parties: the truth is more complex. Unlike the parties in Scotland,  Alexander had access to market research that showed the ballot paper gave rise to a high level of disallowed votes. He claims that they decided on the design on the basis of surveys showing it commanded majority support among voters. But this was not the crucial issue: minimal levels of misunderstanding should have been the goal.

A generous interpretation of this error might be that Alexander and his advisers were simply naïve or lazy. Yet given the intense political manipulation endemic in New Labour campaigning it seems inconceivable that the backroom policy advisers did not take the opportunity to run the survey results through their election simulators. They would then have found that confusion over the voting instructions would primarily penalise the smaller parties standing only on the list vote and the SNP’s constituency vote. The most typical disallowed vote was one split between SNP and Green or SNP and socialist where both votes were cast on the list.

Ironically the outcome, had this aspect of the fiasco been avoided, would not have been dramatically different. On a back-of-the-envelope calculation the SNP would have won a few more constituency seats but at the expense of roughly the same number of list seats. The Greens would have won up to another 6-8 seats and the socialist parties perhaps a couple, mainly at the expense of the three unionist parties. A possible projection would be as follows:

This would still mean an SNP minority Government. The major practical change would be a rather more balanced unionist/independence balance: 60/69 as against the actual 50/79.

So, you may ask, why bother having an inquiry? The principal answer is that that Alexander’s vote-rigging (if that is indeed the case) is unacceptable in any democratic society. By disenfranchising individual voters it brings politics and indeed all public life into disrepute. Failure to punish such behaviour not only devalues democracy but also encourages the culprits to continue as before.

And, with a referendum in prospect, we cannot afford to allow this issue to remain unresolved.