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Silvia Marton gave a keynote lecture at the Conference titled “Residues and Innovations within Imperial Orders. Political Assemblies in Continental Europe, 1800–1850” and held at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, on 23 January 2025. Her lecture focused on electoral politics, on the meaning of voting, and on how and why candidates, MPs, and voters used and denounced electoral fraud and corrupt practices during the pre-democratic period in the nineteenth century in Romania. She zoomed in on the political conflict of the 1860s and on its climax, the failed 1870 republican coup orchestrated by the Liberal radicals in Romania (the left wing of the emerging Liberal party, also known as the “Reds” for their revolutionary leanings and 1848 record). Her lecture analysed how the 1860s crisis and the failed coup reorganized power and institutional relations for decades to come and stabilized the parliamentary system. She also showed that the Liberals and the Conservatives, the two main rival political groups, quasi-unanimously condemned electoral interference on moral grounds and they accepted it as a pragmatic tool, and that repeated and systematic electoral interference and its denunciation stabilized and legitimized the representative regime and the two-party system.