Russian actors made fake video depicting mail-in ballots for Trump being destroyed, FBI says
CTV
Russian actors made a widely circulated video falsely depicting mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania, U.S. officials said Friday.
Russian actors were behind a widely circulated video falsely depicting mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania, U.S. officials confirmed on Friday.
The video had taken off on social media Thursday but was debunked within three hours by local election officials and law enforcement after members of the public reported it.
U.S. officials said in a statement sent by the FBI that they believe the video was “manufactured and amplified” by Russian actors. The officials said it’s part of “Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the U.S. election and stoke divisions among Americans.”
The information was released in a joint statement by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The Bucks County Board of Elections had identified the video as fake on Thursday, saying the envelope and other materials in the video “are clearly not authentic materials belonging to or distributed by" the board.
The quick knockdown of the staged video showed how election officials have learned to move swiftly to counter false narratives over the last four years, ever since a large swath of American voters became distrustful in the voting process in 2020. Yet the video’s detailed mimicking of ballots in a key county in this year's presidential race was a wake-up call that demonstrated how committed foreign actors are to undermining faith in the U.S. voting process in the critical stretch before voting concludes.
The video showed a person sorting through what looked like mail ballots labeled as coming from Bucks County. The person, who was Black, appeared to be tearing up ballots marked for Trump, and leaving alone ballots marked for Vice President Kamala Harris.
