Russia is behind fake voting video, US officials sayExBulletin

Board of Elections Director Tyler Burns holds a test ballot during a mail-in ballot processing demonstration September 30 in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. A fake video purporting to show destroyed ballots in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, showed different envelopes and ballots. than what the county actually uses. Hannah Beier/Getty Images .

switch captionHannah Beier/Getty Images

Russia made and released a fake video purporting to show someone destroying marked ballots for former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, U.S. officials said Friday.

The fake video was quickly debunked by local elections officials and the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, prosecutors' office. But it still circulated widely on social networks, notably Elon Musk's X, where it accumulated hundreds of thousands of views.

“This Russian activity is part of a broader effort by Moscow to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of U.S. elections and to inflame divisions among Americans,” said the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. in a joint statement.

Russian propagandists also created fake videos targeting Vice President Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

The purported Bucks County video shows a person's hands opening envelopes and removing and examining the ballots inside. The person tears up ballots marked for Trump, swearing at the former president, while leaving the ballots marked for Harris alone. “Vote Harris,” the voice says at one point.

But the envelopes and ballots presented are not the ones the county uses to vote, the Bucks County Board of Elections said.

The video was posted by an X account that shared another video last week containing false accusations against Walz, which intelligence officials also attributed to Russia. The account also promoted the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory.

Darren Linvill, co-director of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, traced the Bucks County video to a Russian propaganda operation known as “Storm-1516,” first identified by Clemson, known for its tactic of producing staged videos that it then laundered through influencers and fake news outlets.

“The particular video about Bucks County came from an account that we were familiar with,” Linvill said. “He is already at the origin of the stories of the Tempest-1516.”

He said the operation featured consistent “narratives,” including a focus on corner issues, the use of particular actors and “stylistic elements of their videos that suggest to us that these things are definitely not authentic.” .

Microsoft said the same Russian Operation Storm-1516 was also behind a staged video falsely accusing Harris of injuring someone in a 2011 hit-and-run, which was released via a website claiming to be a local San Francisco television station. There is no evidence that such an incident occurred and the alleged TV channel does not exist.

NPR's Miles Parks contributed reporting to this story.

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