[krastanov]

On the contrary, these things are on a spectrum. In many places elections are not fair, but they are also not completely controlled either -- e.g. someone can bias the election results in their favor by 10 percentage points but still lose if something happened recently that caused their support to drop by 30 percentage points. That is the reality in many places (and that type of unfair biasing happens in bastions of democracy in the West too, e.g. gerrymandering). The peaceful transfer of power is much more crucial than the election being *perfectly* fair (because we hardly have perfectly fair elections -- "mostly" fair and "well representative" is what we can hope for most of the time).

[alephnerd]

To add on to krastonov's explaination, to help ensure peaceful transitions of power, lots of younger democracies like South Korea will give outgoing presidents a blanket pardon of any crimes.

That way, you don't have an incentive to pull a Netenyahu and Obran and constantly try to remain in power to maintain criminal immunity.