Learn English – What does “What a life!” mean

It depends on the context.

He stole the election

could mean:

• he won the election by some kind of unscrupulous means (that might include voter fraud, a dirty campaign, the miscounting of ballots, etc.)

or, it could mean:

• he won the election by a razor-thin margin (particularly if he was not projected to win, but made an 11th-hour comeback)

When an election is close, it probably means a combination of those two, because, the closer an election, the more people start to think about how the result might have been altered had one or two factors gone differently.

When an election is a landslide, though, stealing an election would generally imply that some kind of dirty tactics were used, either on election day, or during the campaign.

The usual wording of this idiom is "the pot calling the kettle black". The idea is that the pot is black itself, so it is not in the position of being able to accuse the kettle of being black. A very similar idiom you will probably be familiar with is "he who lives in a glass house shouldn't throw stones [at others]", or any variations thereof. Wikipedia has more similar idioms still.

The pot-kettle situation is a shorthand to refer to that idiom. It is not a common shorthand, so you won't find it in a dictionary. It is just a hint by this particular author at the actual idiom.