There are two ways to win a contest: fairly or unfairly.

So far, the two remaining contestants for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, have played by the rules governing the primary process. They've raised money, campaigned endlessly, bought time on television for their advertisements, participated in countless debates and, ultimately, collected delegates from their respective victories.

As of Tuesday night, when he won the North Carolina primary and lost the Indiana one by the narrowest of margins, Obama appeared to have a decisive hold on the number of delegates needed to claim his party's nomination. His victory in North Carolina and Clinton's failure to get a slam dunk in Indiana came despite many weeks of bad news, tough campaigning and losses for Obama.

Unless something dramatic happens during the few remaining small primary contests, unless the superdelegates now streaming to him reverse course and run toward Clinton, Obama could wrap up the nomination fairly and squarely with more than enough of the delegates required by his party to win.

There's one more scenario, though -- the unfair contest, wherein the rules are changed after the start of the game.

Clinton is poised to pursue a fight to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida at the Democratic convention. Those are the two states whose delegates were stripped by the national party organization because they broke party rules and held their primaries too early. Despite that, Clinton campaigned in, and won, those two states -- Obama didn't even appear on the Michigan ballot. Now, she wants the delegates she "won."

This editorial board is agnostic as to who wins the Democratic nomination. We are, however, strong believers in the democratic process, which should include sticking to the rules set up at the outset of a contest.

In the case of the Democratic presidential nomination, those rules do include a provision that allows superdelegates -- the party's high-level members, including elected officials -- to overturn the result of the primary process if they believe the candidate who won that process will be a disaster in the general election.

But those party rules should not allow replays of the third and seventh innings of a nine-inning game -- which is what including the results from Michigan and Florida primaries would amount to.

This country was driven toward cynicism about the electoral process by George W. Bush's eventual victory over Al Gore -- handed to him by the Supreme Court -- in the close and contested 2000 election.

That cynicism would be child's play compared to a win for Hillary Clinton based on party pooh-bahs changing the rules to allow previously banned votes to ultimately count. Add to that the fact that such a scenario would take away the victory of this country's first major-party African-American presidential nominee, and you have all the ingredients for tremendous voter disaffection -- as well as a profound injustice.

If Clinton wants to take this nomination fight all the way to the Denver convention, so be it. That's her right. If she wants to make the argument that Obama can't appeal to white, working-class people and she can, that's her right. If she can convince the party's elite superdelegates to hand her the nomination based on that racial argument, the rules allow that.

(What that might do to the Democratic Party is the Democratic Party's problem.)

But for Clinton to try to win her party's nomination by pushing through a rules change mid-contest amounts to stealing the nomination.

And that's not fair.