A series of bomb threats made at polling stations across the US appeared to originate in Russia, the FBI has confirmed.
At least two polling sites in the key battleground state of Georgia have fallen victim to bomb threats, which caused both sites to evacuated.
The threats were later revealed to be hoaxes and the polling stations were reopened around 30 minutes later, with election officials claiming Russian agents were behind the threats.
Those reports were later denied by the Russian Embassy in the US, which described them as ‘malicious slander’.
‘They’re up to mischief, it seems,’ said Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. ‘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.’
Speaking to reporters, Raffensperger also referred to a cyber-attack on the state of Georgia’s website last month which targeted the page allowing voters to request absentee ballots.
‘Just like we had the DDoS attack on Monday, October 14,’ he added. ‘42,000 pings denial of service from Russians. So we added that interface: “I am a human, not a robot.”‘
In a statement, the FBI said it was aware of non-credible bomb threats to polling locations in several states, with many of them originating from Russian email domains.
Officials at the Russian Embassy were quoted by state-owned media saying: ‘All insinuations about ‘Russian machinations’ are malicious slander, invented for use in the domestic political struggle of the United States.’
In Michigan, bomb threats were reported at several polling stations but were deemed to be not credible, the state’s governor confirmed.
In an afternoon update, Michigan’s Secretary of State spokeswoman Angela Benander said: ‘As far as Russia ties, we have been notified that that is what they believed has happened; that they are tied to Russia. They’re swatting attacks, and that they are all non-credible.’
Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro told reporters there had been multiple bomb threats called into polling places, but nothing ‘credible’ had been confirmed.
Other bomb threats reported in Detroit were also quickly confirmed to be hoaxes, while an investigation into a threat at an courthouse in Maricopa County, Arizona, is ongoing.
The FBI on Tuesday warned Americans about two new fake videos falsely citing terror threats and voter fraud, the latest in a string of disinformation that officials expect will intensify as voters head to the polls on Election Day.
One fabricated video purporting to be from the federal law enforcement agency falsely cited a high terror threat and urged Americans to ‘vote remotely,’ while another video includes a fake press release alleging to be from the agency and claiming rigged voting among inmates in five prisons.
To combat misinformation, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are running a national election command post around the clock through at least November 9.
‘What all of these folks are doing is triaging information,’ James Barnacle, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s investigative division, said in a statement. ‘We’ve had information coming in to the FBI in the last few days.’
On Monday, U.S. intelligence agencies said they expected overseas influence operations to ‘intensify through election day and in the coming weeks,’ particularly in the seven battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Still, U.S. cybersecurity agency director Jen Easterly has said her department has not seen evidence of any activity that could directly impact the outcome of Tuesday’s election.
U.S. intelligence agencies last week blamed Russia for a false video purporting to show a Haitian immigrant claiming to have voted multiple times in the U.S. state of Georgia. Over the weekend, the FBI warned about several other fake videos.
Meanwhile, Trump himself is currently facing charges of election interference in Fulton County, Georgia, alongside his former attorney Rudy Giuliani and several others who falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen.
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