(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 $10, filled them out, and threw them into mailboxes without any supervision from observers, and that’s it,” Putin said, without providing evidence.
Of course, that was my point with 10$ 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.