(Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin, running for a new six-year term in an election that his opponents say is a parody of democracy, said on Tuesday that past U.S. elections had been rigged by postal voting.
“In the United States, previous elections were falsified through postal voting … they bought ballots for $10, filled them out, and threw them into mailboxes without any supervision from observers, and that’s it,” Putin said, without providing evidence.
Valid ballots have signatures matching the registered voter casting the ballot.
In Putin’s scenario, there are no signatures, the ballots are not associated with registered voters, and as such would be rejected at the polling location.
That is not involved in the supervision of filling them out nor posting them. Both those things happen before or after, not during.
Nobody supervises the filling out of ballots, that’s an entirely private matter.
The only supervision that happens is the comparing of signatures and that happens both at in person and vote by mail voting.
Which is indeed what I stated from the beginning. Well done catching up.