This chapter tests the book’s main argument and the three proposed mechanisms by analyzing the effectiveness of vote-buying schemes in Argentina, Colombia, and Turkey. To avoid repetition, I highlight one mechanism per country, using a critical-case approach. In Colombia’s 2022 elections, weak partisanship and an atomized party system imply that recipients might respond instrumentally to electoral gifts. Nevertheless, using a conjoint experiment, I show strong partisan response, thus highlighting the low bar for partisan affinity to disrupt machine politics. Competitive authoritarianism in Turkey should bias elections in the incumbent’s favor, but I show that local competition for the Kurdish vote and intensive campaigns in the 2015 elections caused the incumbent party to target many unbuyable voters and made the vote buying strategy to fail nationally. Finally, in Argentina the use of partisan ballots should increase recipient compliance. Employing observational data and a photo-based survey experiment from the 2021 elections, I instead show that recipients believe in ballot secrecy and vote their true preferences where prior local electoral competition was vibrant but comply by voting for the machine where it had been locally dominant. The findings from these three critical-case tests show the surprisingly weak conditions that can make vote buying ineffective and imply that my argument generalizes to other competitive systems rife with clientelism.