WASHINGTON – Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that despite most of the elections running smoothly on Tuesday, there were some reported bomb threats to polling places.
Raffensperger said all the threats were deemed non-credible and authorities were investigating.
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Raffensperger said during a news conference at noon Tuesday that the threats were “of Russian origin.”
He thanked his team for everything running so smoothly in the Peach State, which is under a lot of scrutiny as a swing state.
“People are having a great voting experience,” Raffensperger said, pointing out that wait times are short and check-in times are running around 49 seconds.
Helping voting run relatively smoothly on Election Day was the fact that tens of millions of Americans had already cast their ballots. Those included record numbers of voters in Georgia, North Carolina and other battleground states that could decide the winner.
While there have been no major reports of any malicious cyberactivity affecting election offices, foreign actors have been active in using fake social media profiles and websites to drum up partisan vitriol and disinformation. In the final weeks, U.S. intelligence officials have attributed to Russia multiple fake videos alleging election fraud in presidential swing states.
On the eve of Election Day, they issued a joint statement with federal law enforcement agencies warning that Russia in particular was ramping up its influence operations, including in ways that could incite violence, and likely would continue those efforts well after the votes have been cast.
Jen Easterly, the nation’s top election security official, urged Americans to rely on state and local election officials for information about elections.
“This is especially important as we are in an election cycle with an unprecedented amount of disinformation, including disinformation being aggressively peddled and amplified by our foreign adversaries at a greater scale than ever before,” she said. “We cannot allow our foreign adversaries to have a vote in our democracy.”