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US election officials said Russia is behind non-credible bomb threats that led to evacuations and a temporary halt to voting in some swing states on Tuesday.
In Georgia, several large Democratic-leaning counties around Atlanta temporarily closed polling places after receiving threats; voting resumed after authorities evacuated and cleared the locations, and many of the precincts will stay open late because of the delays.
Officials in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan also said they received hoax bomb threats.
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“Georgia is not going to be intimidated. Russia just decided they picked on the wrong Georgia,” the state’s top election official Brad Raffensperger said. “They need to pick on the other one in the Black Sea because we’re not going to be intimidated, but we’re just excited about where we are right now.”
More than 5.2 million voters are expected to cast ballots in Georgia, surpassing the state’s 2020 turnout.
Raffensperger said the threatening emails were sent to county officials that included Cyrillic text, tipping them off that they could be from Russia.
The FBI confirmed the emails “appear to originate from Russian email domains. None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far.”
Experts have warned for months that American adversaries — namely Russia, China, and Iran — would try to interfere with the presidential election, even after Nov. 5. Their tactics have become more sophisticated and difficult to track in the last eight years, The New York Times reported.