Russia escalates election interference tactics, US warns

Russia is increasing its efforts to manufacture and disseminate phony videos and bogus information to undermine the legitimacy of the American election and exacerbate already deep divisions, US intelligence agencies warned late Monday — hours before Election Day.

“These efforts risk inciting violence, including against election officials. We anticipate Russian actors will release additional manufactured content with these themes through Election Day and in the days and weeks after polls close” according to a joint statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

The agencies also said that Iran posed a threat to election integrity and had “conducted malicious cyber activities to compromise former President Trump’s campaign.”

Late last month, intelligence officials said Russian operatives were behind a fake video supposedly showing someone tearing up ballots in Pennsylvania.

Over the weekend, the Russian Embassy in Washington denied, in a statement on Telegram, that it had anything to do with videos that falsely appeared to show voting fraud. “We view these allegations as baseless,” the embassy said in the statement.

The amount of content created and spread by operatives working for US adversaries has increased in the 2024 election compared to previous ones, according to David Salvo, managing director at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy and Malign Autocratic Influence. Russia and Iran are also using a greater variety of tactics this time, with use of AI and American influencers, he added.

In the period between Election Day and inauguration day, Russia and Iran are likely to amplify domestic actors calling for violence and to “use this particular vulnerability of political extremism to try to galvanize Americans to come out and protest violently,” Salvo said.

Earlier Monday, Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told reporters that “we are in an election cycle with an unprecedented amount of disinformation, including disinformation being aggressively pedaled and amplified by our foreign adversaries at a greater scale than ever before.”

“We cannot allow our foreign adversaries to have a vote in our democracy,” she added.