It started with Georgia: a handful of bomb threats sent to polling locations in heavily Democratic areas. Two polling sites in Union City outside Atlanta, where the population is nearly 90 percent Black, were temporarily shut down. Georgia officials, citing federal law enforcement, named Russia as the culprit, as the threats had come from that nation’s email domains.
As Election Day went on, the threats kept coming, causing polls to close and evacuate for short periods. It seems Russia was brazenly interfering on Trump’s behalf, as it has in the past—but more openly this time.
There have been dozens of bomb threats today in blue areas around Atlanta. In Fulton County, the police chief said law enforcement had responded to 32. Multiple precincts faced temporary closures. “They don’t want us to have a smooth, fair, and accurate election,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
The threats targeted Democratic areas in other swing states as well. Several were sent to Arizona’s Navajo County, where many Native Americans vote. (Secretary of State Adrian Fontes also blamed Russia.) The critical “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania received threats too, as did Minnesota, Maine, and Ohio, according to various reports. “The FBI is aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains,” the agency said in a statement. “None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far.”
If Russia is indeed the culprit, it means President Vladimir Putin feels sufficiently emboldened to help Donald Trump openly on Election Day by attempting to disenfranchise Democratic voters. This effort follows the recent disinformation of viral videos by a Russian-backed propaganda outfit. As Mother Jones has reported, evidence links a Moscow-backed disinformation unit to fake videos stoking fears of voter fraud in recent weeks. One of the videos purported to show recent Haitian immigrants voting for Kamala Harris in Georgia; in another, Haitian immigrants brag about voting in multiple precincts in the state. A third bogus video shows mail-in ballots for Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania.
Putin would clearly prefer to have Trump in the White House. The former president has said he would broker peace between Russia and Ukraine, which would be a win for Russia, has questioned America’s membership in NATO, and is generally solicitous of Putin and other authoritarian leaders. Harris, on the other hand, has stated her commitment to supporting Ukraine and strengthening NATO.
In the wake of the bomb scares, the US intelligence community has warned that Putin’s goal is to sow chaos and distrust in the democratic process. They don’t expect Russian interference to go away just because Election Day is winding down. “If chaos is the point,” Chris Krebs, former director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told the Washington Post, “the most opportune window to create mischief is the post-November 5th pre-certification period.”
