Russian monitors report election irregularities as Putin eyes 4th presidential term

It must the American's meddling, yes!

Forcing people to vote and for Putin is more an act of a thug than a democrat.

Putin likes to act tough, but he is too much of a coward to allow free and fair elections.

It says in the article,

145,000 observers are monitoring the voting in the world's largest country, including 1,500 foreigners

Just like Mugabe and others, Putin and Xi don't want to give up their power. But history tells us things usually don't end well for the country and for the dictator.

Irregularities would that be the arrests of opponents, or the banning of protests. Killings, or just the media in Russia not giving fair coverage to any opposition. There are quite a few "Irregularities" A new emperor as with China neither has any clothes.

This is the future of US elections, only slightly worse than in 2016 and in a lot of areas with how the GOP does gerrymandering or does not allow minority or black voting to occur based on threats (although that is coming back to bite them in the arse). And you KNOW Trump is very envious of how China's president has given himself endless power, and now Putin is doing the same. Hell, even Abe is trying it.

They have Election monitors ? Surely they mean the screens showing the results rather than any form of oversight.... ?

Looks as if we get more coverage of Putin and the great outdoors shirtless!

Brace yourselves.

They need to be able to show there was a turnout for this sham "election" .

Far more clever than a normal dictatorship the Putinocracy.

I've watched several videos of election center supervisors stuffing the ballot boxes. Probably wouldn't have changed the outcome only increased the numbers for Emperor Putin.

The irregularity is that they called it an election, when it's just a dictator putting on a show.

Dr. Yekaterina - write, "Vladimir Putin is a thuggish jerk" on your ballot.

"It's not something you can argue about," she said at a cafe Saturday. "People were indignant at first, said 'They're violating our rights' ... but what can you do?"

This is the future Republicans want.

Day after day, the mods tolerate absurd conspiracy theories and slurs against liberals by the usual cadre of right-wing trolls here. This comment if factually accurate, as Republicans are notorious for engineering restrictions to disenfranchise voters of color and deny them their rights. Yet the mods quickly delete this post. We had one of the regular trolls claiming that the political left supports eugenics - not a shred of evidence, just straight-up trolling. Mods did nothing. Here something that makes the GOP look bad and is based on facts - immediately taken down. This site must do something about the radical rightwing agenda of its mods or else stop pretending to be anything but a propaganda site.

If they want to make voting mandatory, then make it a law

Otherwise, employers forcing employees to provide proofs they voted is unlawful

If Putin was keeping voters away there wlulld be negative reports about it in our " free press" , now when he is trying to get people to vote its being reported in negative light as well. Hmm....unbiased , surely. Free concerts for first time voters and free cancer screening for the oldies? So what?...In Aus if you dont go to vote you cop a fine, in Japan you dont go to vote you end up with the LDP monopoly ......dont know which is worse.

Is it boomerang effect or Trumpland involvement?

Russians, Germans in favor of long term strong leader. Is Abe will be same for Japan ?

There has been no such thing as a strong Japanese leader for many many decades.

Putin likes to act tough, but he is too much of a coward to allow free and fair elections.

Dunno...he may be called many things but i don,t think Putin fits a definition of a coward judging by his past record. Besides , as hard as it is for western media to accept the fact is most Russians like him for the strong leader he is ( authoritarian, possibly ) but they remember well, he was the one who brought Russia back from the brink when he took over from that drunk Yeltsin.

russia and China are the only countries that have around 80% public popularity. But some warmongers want to force democracy on the world by force.

British caller just now on CSPAN questioning the standard "Russia did it" propoganda. The guest on CSPAN is a former NSA apparatchik. Glad to hear some Brits don't trust their govt. so much.

Russians, Germans in favor of long term strong leader. Is Abe will be same for Japan ?

Putin doesn't let anybody push him around, that's why Russians like him and the West hate him.

Simple as that.

This is the future Republicans want.

This is the new norm the Democrats want, another grievance topic they can add to their growing list of argumentive political and social viewpoints.

This is the future of US elections, only slightly worse than in 2016 and in a lot of areas with how the GOP does gerrymandering or does not allow minority or black voting to occur based on threats (although that is coming back to bite them in the arse). And you KNOW Trump is very envious of how China's president has given himself endless power, and now Putin is doing the same. Hell, even Abe is trying it.

If you say that, the right could easily make the case that the left in many areas allow illegals to vote, released felons, dead people, unwilling to allow widespread implementation of voter ID laws, the left can’t say anything about the right when it comes to shady politics.