When a large-scale vote is really tight, there will be people questioning its legitimacy anyway, no matter if it's technically correct. When a vote outcome is

When a large-scale vote is really tight, there will be people questioning its legitimacy anyway, no matter if it's technically correct. When a vote outcome is clearly in favour of one direction, people don't tend to argue about the legitimacy of it, provided the process was reasonable enough. In that case, the numbers might be argued, but not the outcome unless there is a stronger belief in vote-rigging or voter-suppression. In the UK, it's quite easy for a small number of individuals to cheat in elections and double-vote, due to how voting wards are assigned when people move home, or have multiple places they live. Or to cheat by pretending to be someone else. But we assume cheating isn't widespread enough to matter in the grand scheme of things (even if the occasional "wrong" MP did get in on a knife edge), and consider ease of voter participation to be a sounder basis of governance, compared with draconian identity-tracking schemes that deter representation because of all the actual people who for one reason or another would not participate.