Russia blamed for hoax bomb threats targeting multiple US polling stations

Hoax bomb threats, many of which appeared to originate from Russian email domains, were directed at polling locations in the United States as Election Day voting was underway, the FBI has said.

The agency said five of seven battleground states had been targeted — Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

“None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far,” the FBI said in a statement, adding that election integrity was among the bureau’s highest priorities.

Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, blamed Russian interference for the bomb hoaxes.

“They’re up to mischief, it seems. They don’t want us to have a smooth, fair and accurate election, and if they can get us to fight among ourselves, they can count that as a victory,” Mr Raffensperger told reporters.

A senior official in his office, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Georgia bomb hoaxes were sent from email addresses that had been used by Russians trying to interfere in previous US elections.

The threats were sent to American media and polling locations, the official said, adding that there was “a likelihood it’s Russia”.

Two locations in Georgia’s Fulton County were evacuated for about 30 minutes, officials said, and the county was seeking an emergency court order to extend their opening times.

An FBI official said Georgia received more than two dozen threats, most in Fulton County, which encompasses much of Atlanta, a Democratic stronghold.

Police in DeKalb County, Georgia — another Democratic stronghold — later responded to bomb threats at eight locations, according to a county press release. 

Six of the locations were polling places and were evacuated, but no bombs were found at either site.

Russia dismisses claims as ‘slander’

The Russian embassy in Washington said insinuations about Russian interference were “malicious slander”.

“We would like to emphasise that Russia has not interfered and does not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, including the United States,” the embassy said in a statement. 

“As President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stressed, we respect the will of the American people.”

In Wisconsin, fake bomb threats were sent to two polling locations in the state capital of Madison, but they did not disrupt voting, said Ann Jacobs, head of the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

A spokesperson for Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, said there had been reports of bomb threats at several polling locations, but none were credible.

Adrian Fontes, the Arizona secretary of state, a Democrat who is the chief election official in the swing state, said four fake bomb threats had been delivered to polling sites in Navajo County, located in the north-eastern part of the state and which includes three Native American tribes.

“Vladimir Putin is being a prick,” Mr Fontes told Reuters.

A judge in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, extended voting hours to 9pm after a bomb threat at a vote-counting site disrupted the process.

Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, said on Tuesday night multiple bomb threats had been investigated and none were found to be credible. He did not mention Russia.

Fake FBI videos spark election disinformation warnings

The phoney bomb threats mark the latest in a string of examples of alleged interference by Russia in the 2024 US election.

On November 1, US intelligence officials warned Russian actors had manufactured a video that falsely depicted Haitians illegally casting ballots in Georgia. 

Intelligence officials also found a separate phoney video was created that falsely accused someone associated with the Harris presidential ticket of taking a bribe from an entertainer.

US intelligence officials have also accused Russia of interfering in past US presidential elections, especially the 2016 race which Trump won against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Still, there were no major incidents reflecting foreign interference in Tuesday’s presidential election, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, despite a steady stream of disinformation aimed at disrupting the vote throughout Election Day.

Senior agency official Cait Conley said there was little evidence of significant disruption to election infrastructure.

“At this point, we are not currently tracking any national-level significant incidents impacting security of our election infrastructure,” she told reporters on Tuesday evening, local time.

Earlier in the day, the FBI warned Americans about three new fake videos that used its name and insignia to promote false information about the vote, the latest in a string of disinformation that officials expect will intensify, especially if uncertainty over the winner lingers past Election Day.

The first video falsely claims the FBI had warned media and bloggers against publishing “information about violence at polling stations”, claiming that doing so could spontaneously increase such incidents and that withholding such information would ensure the safety of US citizens.

The second fake FBI video claims schools will be suspended until November 11 due to “the risk of school shooting and riots” because of the election.

The third falsified FBI video claims the agency has received “9,000 complaints about malfunctioning voting machines”, along with a claim that machines had been found to be submitting votes for select candidates.

ABC NEWS Verify is staying across some of the mis- and disinformation narratives emerging online as vote counting continues. 

One of the common threads taking hold early are voter fraud and election rigging in Pennsylvannia. 

Donald Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, earlier today to post an allegation of election cheating.

“A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!,” he wrote.

The claim was debunked within minutes by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner as having “no factual basis”.

Thousands of accounts on X have also been sharing a video as evidence of “fraud” in Pennsylvania, which ABC News Verify found to be footage of an old and widely debunked video of election workers in Arizona that was filmed in 2022 ahead of the US midterms. 

Reuters has previously reported that what the video actually shows is a “routine procedure to install memory cards into voter machines”.

Despite this, the video has already been viewed hundreds of thousands of times and reposted extensively.

Loading…

ABC/Reuters

>read more at © abc news

Views: 0