Politics

Bomb threats sent to polling places and ballot-counting locations in at least five battleground states across the U.S. Tuesday targeted mostly Democratic counties, an NBC News analysis has found.

The full extent of who received the bomb threats is not clear. None are believed to have been deemed credible.

[The] high-population Democratic counties include voting locations for Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Detroit, Michigan; Phoenix, Arizona; Atlanta, Georgia; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Maricopa County, Arizona, which Biden won by a slim margin, has consistently been the subject of election denialism conspiracy theories. The other five — Michigan’s Wayne County, Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia County and Georgia’s DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties — were some of the largest Democratic strongholds in their respective states.

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Much is still unknown about the threats, including the identity of who sent them. They do appear to have been designed to influence either the perception of the election outcome or the outcome itself, as all the threats known to NBC News were sent to the handful of battleground states widely believed by both parties to be crucial for winning the election.

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“This is an extraordinary and very disturbing development,” said Larry Norden, the vice president of the elections and government program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. “Whether it’s a foreign or domestic actor that was involved, there needs to be repercussions for it.”

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The FBI said in an emailed statement Tuesday that “many” of the threats “appear to originate from Russian email domains.” Some additional threats appeared to have been sent from a French service, a U.S. official briefed on the matter told NBC News. Anyone with unrestricted internet access can sign up for email services in other countries, making it difficult to deduce who actually sent the threats.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has openly blamed Russia for the threats since late Tuesday morning, though it’s not clear if he’s referencing the ones coming through a Russian email service or has access to additional intelligence.

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