But America has lived through many rigged elections. The most unsavoury one was the presidential election of 2000 when Al Gore defeated George W. Bush by a million votes. But in the US, it is the electoral college that determines the next president, and in 2000, it was all down to Florida where Jeb Bush, George W’s brother, was governor. The vote was so close that the state electoral authority ordered a recount. This decision was overruled by the supreme court, and we still don’t know in which column the 537 uncounted votes would have been recorded. Bush’s victory gave us the invasion of Afgha­nistan and Iraq, and the ‘war on terror’.

Islamist groups have been arguing for years that elections should be boycotted. They claimed justification when the Muslim Brotherhood won the Egyptian poll under the banner of the Freedom and Justice party in 2012, and formed a coalition government, only to see it toppled by Gen Sisi. In 2014, Sisi won the presidential election, garnering over 95 per cent of the votes.

In the early 1990s, an Islamist party was poised to win the polls in Algeria, but the army-dominated government cancelled the poll, triggering a decade of civil war that saw thousands dead. In both Egypt and Algeria, the Islamists were proved right in their denunciation of electoral politics. The other side of the argument is that once a religious party is in power, it decides it needs to stay as it is doing God’s work. In Iran, where elections are held regularly, the Guardian Council vets each candidate to ensure that he is a good Muslim with a sound character. Thus, the religious hierarchy created by Ayatollah Khomeni remains intact.

Joseph Stalin famously said: “It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.”

Despite this view, fair elections are still possible. I was in Sri Lanka in 2016 when snap polls were called by then president Mahinda Rajapakse on the advice of his soothsayer. I was sure that given his family’s stake in remaining in power, he would rig the election, but it was free and fair, and the incumbent lost. To ensure this surprise outcome, activists from opposition parties kept an eye on each polling station, their mobile phones cameras at the ready. They then followed the ballot boxes to the local counting stations. Their presence caused polling staff to go by the book.

Is there a lesson here for Pakistan?