Many developing democracies suffer from persistent corruption and rule-of-law violations. Growing efforts have focused on establishing anti-corruption institutions to combat this culture of impunity, but success has been modest. We tackle this puzzle by focusing on the calculus of the threatened corrupt elites in undermining serious anticorruption efforts. We examine electoral manipulation, as credible anti-corruption reforms may increase pressure on corrupt elites to fraudulently maintain power in order to control anti-corruption efforts. At the same time, anti-corruption reforms can deter electoral manipulation if they sufficiently raise the costs of law-breaking. Focusing on the representative case of Romania and utilizing a variety of data sources, diagnostics and research designs, we show how credible anti-corruption efforts systematically induce electoral manipulation by the backlash coalition of corrupt politicians. However, this manipulation is constrained by electoral competition, which may be the key to longer-term political consolidation of these `imperfect' democracies.