Russian actors were behind a widely circulated video falsely depicting mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania, US officials confirmed on Friday.
The video was shared on social media on Thursday but was debunked within three hours by local election officials and law enforcement after members of the public reported it.
US 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 is part of “Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US 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 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 of the voting process in 2020.
The video showed a person sorting through what looked like mail ballots labelled as coming from Bucks County. They appeared to be tearing up ballots marked for Mr Trump and leaving alone ballots marked for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Researchers who closely study Russian disinformation had previously connected the video to a Russian disinformation network known as Storm-1516 or CopyCop.
The network has previously shared numerous videos with false claims about Ms Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz.
Darren Linvill, the co-director of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University who closely studies the group, said the user who popularised the Bucks County video on the social platform X had been an early amplifier of several other narratives from this network, including one of its first, in August 2023.
The style and appearance of the latest video matches other videos from the network, said.
After the video had been debunked, the X user who popularised it deleted their original post and shared multiple posts from other accounts decrying it as fake.
America PAC, a super political action committee launched by billionaire X owner Elon Musk to support Mr Trump in his bid for a second term, was among those denouncing the video.
Both Republicans and Democrats in the county called the video out as bogus and expressed concern about how it could affect the election.
“To us, this is disinformation, aimed at scaring voters and dissuading them from using mail-in ballots or on-demand voting that uses the same mail-in ballot process,” the Bucks County Republican Committee wrote in a statement.
“We have seen dirty underhanded tactics this year, from the defacing of signs, letters threatening Trump supporters, and now this video trying to scare Bucks County voters.”
Pennsylvania Senator Steve Santarsiero, chairman of the Bucks County Democratic Committee, called the video an attempt to “cast doubt on our vote by mail system and, ultimately, the outcome of the Presidential Election” in a statement.
