Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has confirmed she met with former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden during a visit to Moscow in April.

Fernández casually dropped the information into her first speech following the weekend's first round presidential poll in which her favored candidate, Daniel Scioli, only scraped first place despite her backing.

It came immediately after she expressed her opposition to the idea of electronic voting.

"If the Argentine parliament approves electronic voting then, when the day comes, I will not know whether to vote or not," she said. "Especially after having chatted with Edward Snowden when I was in Russia, which I will reveal now for the first time."

Fernández went on to describe the American whistleblower as "the man who revealed the secrets behind the handling of history, life, and information technology in the world."

Reports of the meeting during Fernandez's visit to Russia in the Spring had already surfaced in June when Anthony Romero, director of the American Civil Liberties Union and Snowden's lawyer, told a local paper that the pair had chatted for about an hour.

The conversation came within the context of a report on local TV Channel TN that cited intelligence documents from Snowden to allege the UK government had launched a major spying operation against Argentina between 2006 and 2011 .

The report said the operation was triggered by fears that Argentina was on the point of trying to recover the Falkland Islands from British rule. The islands, known as Las Malvinas in Argentina, were at the centre of a war between the two nations in 1982.