Public votes held in Russia’s new regions were honest and transparent because people showed up to cast their ballots in person, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday. He went on to contrast the process with voting by mail in the US.
Speaking at a meeting with municipal educators in Moscow, the Russian president brought up the 2020 American presidential election as an example of what democracy should not look like.
“It’s probably possible to falsify anything. Just like the previous elections in the US were falsified through voting by mail. Well, it’s clear what voting by mail is. They bought ballots for $10, wrote them in, and without any supervision from observers, tossed them into mailboxes. And there you go,” Putin said.
His observation came in response to a question about the voting in Kherson and Zaporozhye regions and the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, four formerly Ukrainian territories that joined Russia in 2022. No one forced people there to show up at the polls, or barred them from doing so – they simply voted with their feet, Putin said.
“What is this, if not democracy? Democracy is when people express their will,” the Russian president said.
Multiple US states changed their election rules in 2020 to allow voting via mail-in ballots, citing the Covid-19 pandemic. The final official results showed Democrat Joe Biden winning 81 million votes, the most ever in US history, over the incumbent, Republican Donald Trump.
Trump has challenged the election as “rigged,” pointing to various irregularities in half a dozen states as well as the mail-in ballots that were impossible to audit. The Democrats and most US media have denounced anyone questioning the 2020 vote as an “election denier” and insisted that everything was perfectly legitimate.
According to a February 2021 account in Time magazine, Biden became president because of a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” who were “fortifying” the election by “working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”