Russian email domains sent uncredible bomb threats to polling places, FBI says

Bomb threats that have slowed or delayed polling processes around the nation appear to be tied to a slew of Russian email addresses, the FBI said in a Tuesday afternoon statement.

“The FBI is aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains. None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far,” the statement reads.

Russia propagated a fake bomb threat targeting a polling place in Georgia, whose Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Tuesday such a threat was not credible.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has not observed any sustained, coordinated influence operation that’s been built on the bomb threats, though agency senior advisor Cait Conley said “we should not be surprised if we do, because, as we’ve been saying for months, our foreign adversaries will seek out opportunities and capitalize on those opportunities” to undermine confidence in the administration of the election. 

Moscow has built a stacked record of election disinformation attempts over the past several months, aiming to tip the scales of the election in favor of former President Donald Trump, previous intelligence assessments have stated.

Kremlin spin doctors also created a video purporting to show a person from Haiti claiming to have fraudulently voted several times in counties around Georgia, the U.S. intelligence community said Friday.

“We are in communication with impacted entities and will continue to provide support as possible,” said Conley in a Tuesday afternoon briefing with reporters. “While incidents may occur and things like this may cause temporary disruptions to the process, there are measures in place that election officials have implemented to ensure the security and resilience of the overall election administration process.”

Broadly speaking, America’s cyber and infrastructure defense agency still isn’t clocking any serious national-level threats to election security as of 2:30 p.m. EST, as most polls around the nation have opened.

Myriad technical incidents have surfaced throughout Election Day. Voters in Pennsylvania’s Cambria and Bedford counties reported software glitches with their voting machines. A court order issued in Cambria extended open voting times to allow for affected individuals to cast their ballot. 

In New York City, some Queens-based polling sites faced ballot-scanning issues, though the city’s Board of Elections said that “voters have not been impacted beyond additional attempts to scan their ballot” and some have placed them into a back-up bin to be counted later, according to a post on X.

Various scanning glitches have been observed in Virginia, Alabama, Minnesota and a handful of other states, though volunteers at polling sites are working to ensure those ballots are cast and counted, according to a statement from Verified Voting, a group focused on mitigating technology risks in the administration of U.S. elections.

Russia on Tuesday evening vehemently denied involvement in the schemes. “We view these allegations as baseless,” a spokesperson for Russia’s embassy in Washington, D.C. told Nextgov/FCW. “We would like to emphasize that Russia has not interfered and does not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, including the United States.”