Election Day bomb threats overwhelmingly targeted Democrat-leaning counties

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. NBC News compiled a list of 67 locations in 19 counties, based on local news reports and state and local election officials’ statements, all of which appear to have received similar threats. Of the 67 locations, 56 were in 11 counties that voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, including the eight most populated. Those 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.

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. It’s also unclear if the threats tended to focus on urban counties because they are better known or contain more people, or because they tend to be Democratic strongholds.

“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.”

“In some sense, we were lucky that there was a lot of preparation for this scenario going into 2024. I don’t know that anybody expected the coordinated campaign that seems like that we had, but there were a lot of meetings of law enforcement and election officials, tabletop exercises and trainings to be prepared for this, and as a result, I think the disruption was mostly minimized,” Norden said.

Some locations that temporarily shut down on Tuesday, like Dekalb and Philadelphia County, extended their voting hours that evening. None of the threats resulted in a voting location closing for the day and there is no indication that the evacuations had a meaningful impact on voter turnout.

Some of the threats also included counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump in 2020, including the comparatively smaller Blair and Clearfield Counties in Pennsylvania.

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. The FBI declined to provide further comment. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which in the lead-up to the election made formal attributions of online propaganda campaigns to countries like Iran and Russia, declined to comment.

A spokesperson for Russia’s embassy in Washington, D.C., denied the country was responsible.

“We have seen the allegations by US officials you refer to, but no proof of Russian involvement was presented either to the public, or to the Embassy,” the spokesperson said. “The US Authorities didn’t even bother to contact us on this matter.”