Manipulation can be a major impediment to the integrity of elections, and can “legitimize” a government that does not represent the preferences of the people. A wide range of methods to assess the integrity of elections has been established both for political practice and for academic purposes (Norris et al., 2014). After the end of the Cold War, internationally staffed election observation missions became increasingly common (Hyde, 2011), and their reports have been analysed by academics to produce systematic measures of electoral manipulation (Kelley and Kolev, 2010). Researchers also rely on country experts (Norris, 2015), media reports or fraud allegations in court (Alvarez and Boehmke, 2008), or a combination of all three (Hyde and Marinov, 2011). However, such methods tend to be sensitive to partisan messaging about election fraud.