"There is a very significant distinction between a government that either dispenses with elections or rigs them to ensure a favourable outcome and one which conducts free and clean elections at regular intervals. Even if the two governments should evince apparently similar authoritarian management strategies, their political relations with their respective citizens are dissimilar. In the former case, the authoritarian regime will have little legitimacy with the people, the surface calm that repressive measures are able to maintain is merely waiting to explode. In the latter instance, state administrative interventions may be tolerated with a very substantial degree of voluntarism on the part of the electorate because of the covenant of having the leadership to govern."

- Chua Beng Huat, Communitarian ideology and democracy in Singapore 1995


I notice he didn't say "fair".