More than two dozen non-credible bomb threats targeting polling places across the country came from “Russian email domains,” the FBI said Tuesday.
“The FBI is aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains. None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far,” the agency said in a statement.
The FBI did not say which states received the threats. One official told Reuters that Georgia, a crucial swing state, received more than 24 threats, most of which occurred in Atlanta’s Fulton County, Georgia’s most populated district.
At least two Fulton County polling locations targeted by the threats were briefly evacuated on Tuesday. Those two locations reopened after half an hour, officials said. The county is urging a judge to extend the voting sites’ hours past the 7 p.m. deadline.
Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger condemned Russia’s interference in his state’s elections.
“They’re up to mischief, it seems. They don’t want us to have a smooth, fair, and accurate election, and if they can get us to fight among ourselves, they can count that as a victory,” he said. Raffensperger also applauded Georgia’s response to the initial threats saying, “We pretty well dispelled that very quickly.”
