Suspected Russian efforts to rile up Americans and undermine faith in U.S. democracy disrupted voting in at least five states Tuesday but appears to have failed to derail the U.S. election, according to officials charged with overseeing election security.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, said that despite a series of bomb threats and a series of fabricated videos and social media posts aimed to mislead voters, there were no indications anyone had succeeded in sabotaging the ability of Americans to cast ballots in the presidential election.
"At this time, we've seen no evidence of malicious activity impacting the security or integrity of election infrastructure," CISA Director Jen Easterly told reporters after most polling locations across the U.S. had closed.
"While at the national level, we found some minor disruptive activity throughout the day, [it was] activity that was largely expected and planned for," she added.
But multiple senior officials cautioned it would be a mistake to underestimate Russia, as well as Iran and other U.S. adversaries.
"I don't want to count out that our foreign adversaries may still be active in their aims of influence operations to undermine American confidence ultimately and the legitimacy of the results," Easterly said.
CISA’s lead election security official, senior adviser Cait Conley, put it bluntly. "We are not out of the woods yet," she told reporters during an earlier briefing.
The biggest disruptions came as a result of a series of Election Day bomb threats that first targeted polling locations in the southeastern state of Georgia, before plaguing additional voting sites in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona.
The FBI said Tuesday that the majority of the threats, "appear to originate from Russian email domains."
And while CISA officials cautioned that other U.S. adversaries could have used the domain to hide their involvement, some state officials assigned blame directly to Moscow.
"We identified the source, and it was from Russia," Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told reporters.
"They're up to mischief and it seems they don't want us to have a smooth, fair and accurate election," Raffensperger added. "They think if they can get us to fight amongst ourselves, they can count that as a victory."
Police in Georgia described the efforts to disrupt voting as extensive.
"Thirty-two bomb threats at different polling locations. Three-two," said Fulton County Police Chief Wade Yates. "Some [of the threats] were called in to 911. Some were called in at a location and some were emailed."
Officials in Pennsylvania and Arizona said multiple polling locations in their states were also targeted.
Voting at many of the affected locations was paused while law enforcement units checked for explosives, though none were found.
"None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far," the FBI said, adding it would continue to work with state and local authorities to investigate the threats.
CISA’s Easterly said that while voting hours had to be extended at some of the polling sites, the threats did not catch election officials unaware.
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"This was a threat that election officials prepared for and exercised for and effectively mitigated," she said. "While these were certainly disruptive, they ultimately did not impact the ability of citizens to be able to cast their ballots."
But U.S. officials have not ruled out the possibility that the threats were just the first salvo in a Russian effort to spark chaos around the presidential election.
"Our adversaries are specifically intent on leveraging opportunities to spin narratives, to undermine confidence and to pit Americans against one another," Conley said. "We are not aware of any specific Russian activity in terms of influence operations capitalizing on this narrative yet but … we should not be surprised if we do."
Multiple Russian officials Tuesday denied the U.S. accusations, having dismissed previous U.S. claims as "baseless."
The suspected Russian bomb threats, however, built on other last-minute attempts to disrupt the U.S. election.
The FBI on Tuesday warned of at least five efforts to use the bureau's name and likeness to promote false narratives and spark election-related panic.
In one instance, a fabricated statement claiming to be from the bureau warned U.S. media and bloggers to not publish information about violence at polling stations to prevent unrest from spreading.
A second fabricated video purporting to be from the FBI and another government agency suggested U.S. schools close until sometime next week because of concerns about election-related violence.
A third video falsely claimed the FBI had received 9,000 complaints about malfunctioning voting machines, some of which appeared rigged to help one of the presidential candidates.
"This video is also not authentic, is not from the FBI, and its contents are false," the FBI said in a statement.
Earlier, FBI officials called out faked news clips urging Americans to "vote remotely" because of the increased threats of a terror attack and a fabricated video alleging five U.S. prisons were engaged in a vote-rigging scheme.
The FBI did not say who was responsible for creating the videos, which began to circulate just three days after two other fraudulent videos purporting to be from the FBI began circulating on social media.
Another fabricated video targeted the CIA, alleging the U.S. spy agency found evidence that dead Americans were being used to cast ballots.
The video "is absolutely false and is consistent with foreign disinformation that the U.S. Intelligence Community has long warned about," a CIA spokesperson told VOA.
U.S. intelligence officials have assigned responsibility for other videos claiming to show voting irregularities, some surfacing last week, to Russian influence actors.
The latest incidents are part of what some U.S. officials have described as a "firehose of disinformation" and follow a warning from U.S. intelligence agencies late Monday that Russia, and to a lesser extent Iran, were likely to intensify their influence operations on Election Day and in the days and weeks that follow.
"Influence actors linked to Russia in particular are manufacturing videos and creating fake articles to undermine the legitimacy of the election, instill fear in voters regarding the election process, and suggest Americans are using violence against each other due to political preferences," according to the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in coordination with the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
"We anticipate Russian actors will release additional manufactured content with these themes through election day and in the days and weeks after polls close," the statement added. "These efforts risk inciting violence, including against election officials."
Like the FBI and CIA, CISA on Tuesday rejected reports of violence and voting irregularities tied to the U.S. election as lies.
"We have really, on a national perspective, seen very minimal types of disruptive activity in the forms of any type of altercation at polling locations," CISA's Conley told reporters.
And she said allegations of widespread voter fraud have no merit.
"We have been in very close contact with state and local election officials across the country, and we see no data or reporting to support these claims," Conley said.
