(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.
“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,”
Problem - That’s not the way vote by mail works.
You register to vote and place a signature on file.
You get your ballot in the mail and vote.
You put the ballot in the mailing envelope and sign the back of the envelope.
When the ballot is returned, they compare the signature on the envelope with the signature on file, if it matches, the ballot is set aside for counting.
If there’s a PROBLEM:
A) Missing signature
B) Signature doesn’t match
C) Ballot damaged or unreadable
D) Ballot already recorded as present
The ballot gets returned to the voter for correction, assuming there’s enough time for it to be corrected.
What Putin describes wouldn’t work, because the fake ballots either wouldn’t have a signature, wouldn’t have a valid signature, or wouldn’t correspond to a registered voter.
Won’t matter, he is speaking directly to MAGAs, and they already believe that this is the truth
You know how the Nigerian prince scams intentionally use terrible English to filter out the stupid ones?
Half the people you come across are below average. Technology has made it exceptionally effective to target the dumb and vulnerable.
Plus no one is allowed to supervise your ballot entries.
The supervision is the signature comparison, just like in person voting where you’d go in, sign the register, and they’d compare that signature to the one on file.
“filled them out, and threw them into mailboxes without any supervision from observers” Where does that suggest it is the signature involved? The signature is compared before Voting when Voting in person and after the office receives it when Voting by Mail. It makes no sense that lil’ dictator pootie meant the signature in his statement.
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.
Bingo! Thank you for taking the time to write that up.
I fail to see why it would not work though? Instead of paying 10$ for an empty ballot from a registered voter you pay 10$ for an empty ballot from a registered voter and and their signed envelope?
Like I am not saying this happened, because 10$ ballot sales would probably have made the news around the election, I doubt 10$ buys silence. But like I fail to see how this is impossible?
You can’t get that done in enough bulk to sway the election without getting caught.
Of course, that was my point with 10$ doesn’t buy silence. Top comment simply seemed to imply that buying blank mail-in ballots is impossible which for sure doesn’t seem to be. I could even see some nut at least trying to buying say 5-10, but ironically I think a Trump supporter is more likely to try to pull this.
Obtaining blank ballots isn’t the trick, it’s obtaining blank ballots attached to valid, registered voters with a signature on file and matching the signature.
You’d have to do that by the thousands to flip an election and it would only take one person going “I already voted? What do you mean I already voted?” to rumble it.
Even if we just counted ballots with no verification, which we don’t, you’d end up with overcounts which we know did not happen. “Hey, this county only has 5,000 registered voters, how did we get 30,000 ballots?”
The point is you offer someone who registered for mail in to simply sell you their ballot along with a signed envelope. I would vager doing this for a few votes would be fairly easy. Certainly plenty of poor voters would easily sell a vote. Idk about 10, but for 20-50 bucks? For sure. I would imagine someone selling a vote would be less likely to come forward in some respect too, so if you target the right people, at some minor scale you would even get away with it no problem.
Yes this is obviously not happening, not at scale anyway, and certainly not enough to flip the election. But the idea that this is particularly hard in itself, let alone impossible, is absurd.
Oh, yeah, small scale voting fraud has always been a thing.
When we first set up vote by mail 23 years ago, Republican operatives got the bright idea to set up fake ballot drop off locations. The idea was go to Democratic heavy areas, collect the ballots, then just throw them away.
They were arrested. LOL.
Last election cycle there were multiple reports of people doing double voting for family members, they also got caught.
So when small scale stuff like this gets exposed and prosecuted, the idea that fraud on a scale big enough to turn an election would go un-noticed is just laughable.
A lie spreads worldwide before the truth contradicting it can be typed, unfortunately.
Just like Trump lies, Putin requires that there be no evidence to support his claims. Imagine if Trump actually tried to prove his claims with evidence… it would fail. Even if one ended up true that would be worse as then people would expect him to prove things with evidence in the future.