A typical method of ensuring free and fair elections is to have free press, international observers and so on. Whether you trust the OSCE observers or whatever

A typical method of ensuring free and fair elections is to have free press, international observers and so on. Whether you trust the OSCE observers or whatever is of course up to you but let's just define a free and fair election as one held in a stable democracy and recognized as free and fair by the international community and international observers. There is no other useful definition, so you can just as well use that one. If it doesn't meet your standards, then there aren't any free and fair elections. But you just made the term useless for no good reason then. > what does it change? their evidence could even be anecdotal: human error at their polling station. Here is the thing: there are irregularities in ALL elections. But that doesn't make them unfair. All that's required for a "free and fair" election is that the irregularities don't affect the result in any meaningful way. If people saw one person vote twice, they can accuse that person of voting twice. And the legal system will deal with that. But that is not a good reason to call the integrity of the whole election into question unless you have reason to believe there are systematic irregularities. Free and fair doesn't mean "without irregularities".