Consciousness of election fraud has been shown to let individuals withdraw support from candidates allegedly involved in manipulation and to depress citizens’ expressed legitimacy of the elected government that stems out of processes which are perceived to be fraudulent. We outline a theory of attitudinal spillover which argues that information about electoral malpractice will lead individuals to extrapolate legitimacy loss even to political institutions that are unrelated to electoral administration. This theory predicts that consciousness about electoral misconduct won’t let individuals merely detach from the institutions linked to misbehavior and the regime that surged out of an illegitimate election process, but turn their backs on the political system as a whole. Second, we examine if within-system corrections like successful court punishments of alleged fraud perpetrators can moderate decays in diffuse system support. We present empirical evidence from a pre-registered online survey experiment conducted in Mexico and Russia as well as causal estimates from statistical matching techniques based on cross-national survey data. Our findings hold important implications for the study of electoral integrity in new democracies as well as electoral autocracies and its consequences for democratic consolidation and regime stability.