The point of rigging an election, one presumes, is to win it. The president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, one of Africa’s longest-serving dictators, has a long history with the inflated voter roll, the mysteriously disappearing ballot box, and the threatened voter. He successfully employed such tactics in previous elections held in 2000, 2002, and 2005.

Using those methods, Mr. Mugabe seemed to be on track to “win” on Saturday when millions of Zimbabweans are expected to go to the polls to vote in the presidential and parliamentary elections. Except this time, despite his best efforts, there’s a strong chance that he might lose.

According to a poll released last week, the opposition leader and head of the Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai, received 28% support. Mr. Mugabe’s former finance minister and fellow challenger, Simba Makoni, garnered 8% of the support. Mr. Mugabe is supported by 20%.

With a large number of undecided voters, these results leave a lot of room for movement, but must be reassuring to Zimbabwe’s democrats. Reports from the ground indicate that Mr. Tsvangirai is drawing big crowds at his rallies across the country, including rural areas once thought to be Mr. Mugabe’s strongholds. Mr. Mugabe, meanwhile, has had to bus supporters to his gatherings with promises of that rare commodity — food.

A defeat for Mr. Mugabe would, of course, not be for the tyrant’s lack of trying. Last week, Human Rights Watch’s Johannesburg office released a damning, 48-page report detailing what everyone already knew: that Mr. Mugabe has employed violent tactics against his political opponents, manipulated food aid, and imposed ever-harsher restrictions on an already demoralized press corps.

Since traveling to Zimbabwe a year and half ago, it’s hard to understand how the country’s rock-bottom situation could get worse, yet it seems to with each passing day.

To gauge how Mr. Mugabe would respond to a defeat, we need only remember his reaction to the last, and only, time he lost at the polls: the 2000 constitutional referendum. That year, Mr. Mugabe went to the voters with a proposed series of amendments that would have lengthened the amount of time he could serve as president, permit the government to redistribute white-owned farm land without compensation, and enact tougher press censorship laws. Nearly 80% of voters abstained from that vote in protest, and amongst those who did vote, Mr. Mugabe lost decisively, 55%-45%.

But the president acted as if he had won the referendum rather than suffered a humiliating defeat, and carried out all of the proposed draconian constitutional amendments anyway. Not for nothing is HRW’s latest report entitled, “All Over Again.”

It was Mr. Mugabe’s loss in 2000 that set off the theft of white farm land, which inevitably led to the record-high inflation, now at an astonishing 100,000%, starvation, and lawlessness that characterize the country today.

Despite his authoritarian rule, Mr. Mugabe remained a popular leader throughout the 1980s and 1990s thanks to his liberation-era credentials. But the 2000 defeat rendered him incredibly paranoid and shattered his consensual authoritarianism. A new wave of political repression — unseen since his mass murder of Ndebele in the mid-1980s — swept the country as political opponents were hunted down and beaten, and in some instances, killed.

Mr. Mugabe rarely has resorted to murdering his political opponents because he has other ways of accomplishing his dirty business: manipulating food aid and inducing famine in large swathes of the country is a far more effective, and less bloody, method to eliminate one’s political enemies or drive them out of the country in abject desperation.

Again in 2002 and 2005, Mr. Mugabe stole elections. In all three stolen elections, his African neighbors certified the votes as free and fair. There is little reason to assume that this time around their response will be any different. Mr. Mugabe’s friends in South Africa’s ruling African National Congress control the country which supplies power, economic aid, and political legitimacy to Zimbabwe. They also exercise the most leverage over their neighbor to the north and have quietly looked away as Mr. Mugabe has destroyed his country over the past eight years.

The ANC has ignored this manmade catastrophe for the very simple reason that, in the discrediting and defeat of the person whose only attribute is overthrowing white rule, they fear for their own reputations as leaders who depend on their anti-colonial credentials to marshal popular support.

If Mr. Mugabe does lose this Saturday, do not expect him to go quietly, if at all. And, whatever the outcome, expect his chums in Pretoria to make excuses as to why he should stay.

Mr. Kirchick is an assistant editor of the New Republic.