Bomb threats to Georgia voting sites were made over the internet and included Cyrillic letters, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said. That gave election officials a clue about the origins of the threats, he said at an early evening briefing in Atlanta.
“We jumped on it quickly and then the FBI then followed our lead,” he said. He said that once the FBI released a statement about the matter earlier Tuesday, the threats “kind of tapered off.”
He said of the culprits: “I guess they realized that dog won’t hunt today in Georgia.”
Another metro Atlanta county has seen voting disrupted by bomb threats. About an hour before polls were to close, officials in DeKalb County said they received bomb threats against five polling places.
Officials in the overwhelmingly Democratic suburb said voting had been suspended at those locations until police confirm there are no bombs. County officials say they’re seeking a court order to extend voting, which is routine in Georgia when a polling place is disrupted. Some polling places in Fulton and Gwinnett counties were targeted earlier Tuesday. Those threats were found to be false.
“Rest assured that we are working quickly to ensure every voter will have an opportunity to cast their ballot despite these bomb threats,” DeKalb elections director Keisha Smith said in a statement.
Georgia has become the target of foreign interference in the 2024 presidential election, Raffensperger said earlier Tuesday.
Raffensperger told the media on Tuesday that non-credible bomb threats at several precincts in multiple Georgia counties had originated from Russia.
“They’re up to mischief, it seems,” Raffensperger said during a press conference. “They don’t want us to have a smooth, fair, and accurate election. And they think they can get us to fight among ourselves. They can count that as a victory. So that tells you a little about the Russians. They’re not our friends.”
Raffensperger said that law enforcement was handling the situation.
He also blamed Russians for a recent cyber attack against his office’s official website.
The “denial-of-service attack” on Oct. 14 was curtailed when his office added a question to ask if each visitor to its website was a human in order to weed out any bots.
This isn’t the first time Georgia has been targeted by Russia, according to federal officials.
Last week, a video circulating online purportedly showed a Haitian migrant voting with multiple state identification cards claiming to have voted several times.
Raffensperger said the video was “false” and called it “an example of targeted disinformation” that was “likely a production of Russian troll farms.”
Georgia is one of seven key battleground states and carries 16 electoral votes in the 2024 presidential election. President Joe Biden won the state in 2020 by 0.2 percent over Trump, marking the narrowest margin of victory nationwide that year.
Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Tuesday said that the agency’s name and insignia have been used to push a false narrative surrounding the election.
A news clip purporting to be a terrorist warning issued by the FBI was fabricated and spread online. The video stated that Americans should “vote remotely” due to a high terror threat at polling stations.
“This video is not authentic and does not accurately represent the current threat posture or polling location safety,” the agency stated.
Another video contained an FBI press release that was fabricated. The video alleged that the management of five prisons in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona had rigged inmate voting and colluded with a political party.
The FBI confirmed the video was not authentic.
“Election integrity is among our highest priorities, and the FBI is working closely with state and local law enforcement partners to respond to election threats and protect our communities as Americans exercise their right to vote,” the agency stated. “Attempts to deceive the public with false content about FBI threat assessments and activities aim to undermine our democratic process and erode trust in the electoral system.”
Voters should only seek direct information from reliable sources, such as a local election office, the FBI said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.