Voters continuously tell us that they dislike corruption. Yet on election day they often seem to ignore that dislike and vote for corrupt politicians. Whereas previous scholarship has identified that information and care about corruption affects whether voters vote for corrupt politicians or not, we develop a new theory showing how and why a combination of dislike, knowledge and care shapes the role corruption plays in parliamentary elections. We test our hypotheses on Bulgaria, a country that not only has suffered from widespread corruption at all levels of government from the local to the national level but had a blend of both proven corrupt and convincingly clean parties running for office in the 2021 elections. Using a specially commissioned survey from Bulgaria’s leading polling agency Alpha (1000 respondents randomly selected across Bulgaria in July 2021), we find that voters that dislike corruption, identify a party as corrupt, and care about corruption have a significantly lower likelihood of voting for a corrupt party. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the more voters take corruption into account when voting, the more likely they are to vote for clean parties such as “There is such people” and the less likely they are to vote for corrupt parties. To understand fully the role of corruption in elections, we need to look at information about, dislike of and care for corruption. The paper concludes by showing the applicability of the theory not just to other cases in the region, but on a much wider geographical scale.