Atlanta:
No less than two polling websites within the US election battleground state of Georgia had been briefly evacuated on Tuesday after pretend bomb threats that election officers within the state blamed on Russian brokers.
The threats, which had been deemed to be non-credible, induced two polling places in Fulton County, Georgia, to be evacuated. Each reopened after about half-hour, officers mentioned, and the county is in search of a court docket order to increase the placement’s voting hours previous the statewide 7 pm deadline.
Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger mentioned Russian interference was behind the Election Day bomb hoaxes.
“They’re as much as mischief, it appears. They do not need us to have a easy, honest and correct election, and if they’ll get us to battle amongst ourselves, they’ll depend that as a victory,” Raffensperger informed reporters.
The Russian embassy in Washington didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
In an announcement, the FBI mentioned it was conscious of non-credible bomb threats to polling places in a number of states, with a lot of them originating from Russian electronic mail domains.
Georgia alone obtained greater than two dozen phony bomb threats on Election Day, most of which occurred in Fulton County, an FBI official mentioned.
A senior official in Raffensperger’s workplace, talking on the situation of anonymity to talk freely, mentioned the Georgia bomb hoaxes had been despatched from electronic mail addresses that had been utilized by Russians attempting to intervene in earlier US elections.
The threats had been despatched to US media and the 2 polling places, the official mentioned. “It is a probability it is Russia,” the official mentioned.
Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump are locked in a good race to win the White Home. Opinion polls counsel the competition is simply too near name.
The phony bomb threats mark the newest in a string of examples of alleged interference by the Russians within the 2024 election.
On Nov. 1, US intelligence officers warned that Russian actors manufactured a video that falsely depicted Haitians illegally casting ballots in Georgia. Intelligence officers additionally discovered that the Russians created a separate phony video which falsely accused somebody related to the Harris presidential ticket of taking a bribe from an entertainer.
US intelligence officers have additionally accused Russia of interfering in earlier US presidential elections, particularly the 2016 race which Trump received in opposition to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
(Apart from the headline, this story has not been edited by EDNBOX employees and is printed from a syndicated feed.)