Or that a democracy does not change easily to an authoritarian regime. See also Turkey. I would not say Turkey is a democracy right now, maybe only on paper.
I've always found it kinda weird that as soon as people in different countries vote for something we don't like, we consider them no longer democratic.
BUT, like I said, I haven't researched it well enough, so I might be entirely off the mark here. If you have any info on this, I'd love to hear it.
Countries like Turkey who have been on the losing side of power game for at least couple of centuries, or countries like Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Greece that were non-existent before but either their borders drawn with a ruler on the map or too weak to stand alone are under heavy influence of foreign agents/powers. Heck, even US is under heavy influence of interest groups to the extent that public was sold on to the idea of Iraq's invasion. Even then most Americans opposed the Iraq war but their voices were drowned by heavy media bombardment.
Take Iran. Once they had their own elected government but CIA staged a coup [1] and installed Shah. Think for once, if a country is run with democracy, but a real one, would they throw a democratic country and install a dictator instead? US is a very strong country in many respects and hides many large cracks. Don't be fooled by its looks.
You need more than institutions to have a real democracy. It is not easy to have people's voice heard.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/cia-admits-rol...
At least, so says Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran#From_the_1800s_to_the_194...
Unsurprisingly, there were major (in the order of millions of votes) frauds.
A dictator gets over 95% of popular votes. Like in Syria, Egypt, North Korea. In 2015 elections (second in the last) Erdogan's party lost majority to form the government by itself (got 40%). After months of negotiations/bargaining political system could not produce a government and elections are done again and this time they could get the enough majority (49%).
The system in Turkey does not allow irregularities. All political parties have the right (and they do) to be represented at the voting polls. They are the very people who run the process at every polling station, from getting ID cards, finding voters in registries, counting the votes after polls are closed, etc. As you have said you can not find such fraud cases since other political parties and each one of them has to be complicit for a fraud.