The coexistence of a harsh disapproval of corruption and the rather limited electoral consequences of malfeasant behavior is still a conundrum in the social sciences. While elections are expected to be used as an instrument to hold corrupt politicians accountable, studies conducted in multiple countries indicate that voters’ punishment of corrupt politicians is limited. One of the potential explanations for this paradox is that citizens value competence over integrity when evaluating a candidate and casting a vote. While previous studies have mostly assessed the moderating effect of competence on punishing corruption. We argue that a direct tradeoff between competence and integrity is the only way to assess voters’ priorities. Therefore, in this paper we assess citizens’ reaction to a politician that only obtains the optimal outcome by defying the established legal procedure. Through the analysis of an original survey experiment run on a representative sample of the Spanish population (n=1,200) we examine participants’ likelihood of voting for a politician that faces a dilemma in a public bidding process in which being corrupt leads to the most efficient outcome. Furthermore, we test the causal mechanism that explains the link between observing a politician of the preferred party defying the law and the likelihood to vote for him/her.