YARDLEY, Pa. (AP) — 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.
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 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 popularized 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 too, Linvill said.
The video used a Black actor with a foreign accent — a choice that may be intentional as a way to inflame existing divisions on American soil, according to Josephine Lukito, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin who has researched Russian disinformation.
She said the use of a Black actor is common in fake videos originating in Russia for this reason.
“It tends to amplify racism, right?” Lukito said. “There’s already this kind of groundswell of discussion about immigrants that are illegally voting or immigration broadly. Russian disinformation absolutely exploits that.”
After the video had been debunked, the X user who popularized 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 Trump in his bid for a second term, was among those denouncing the video — a stark contrast to the misinformation that frequently spreads on X, often spurred by Musk himself. The PAC declined a request for further comment.
There were multiple clues that immediately indicated the Bucks County video was fabricated. For example, under Pennsylvania law, election officials must wait until 7 a.m. ET on Election Day before they can begin to process ballots cast by mail and prepare them to be counted.
Other tip-offs included the dark green color on the left side of the outer envelopes — it is actually more of a kelly green — and the glossiness of the inner and outer envelopes, which in reality have a matte finish. Plus, none of the envelopes in the video had voters’ return addresses written on them.
Citizen complaints from across Bucks County and a call from the Yardley Borough police chief alerted District Attorney Jennifer Schorn that the video was circulating online. Schorn was in a pretrial conference Thursday and when she emerged she saw the calls about the video pouring in.
“Immediately at that point, we began investigating the video and made our ultimate conclusion that it was, in fact, fabricated,” she said in a phone interview Friday.
Schorn was reluctant to describe how authorities reached their conclusion, citing concerns that subsequent fraudsters could improve their tactics. She said her office has assigned two attorneys to screen allegations of fraud and that they’ll be on “24/7” on Election Day.
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 Sen. Steve Santarsiero, chair 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.
Still, officials were heartened by the speed with which this disinformation and some other harmful falsehoods have been caught during this election cycle.
“I don’t at all blame Americans for wanting to be reassured that the system can be trusted,” Schorn said. “I don’t blame that because, sadly, you know, there are criminal entities out there that do undermine processes. I felt reassured yesterday. I felt like it worked the way it was supposed to.”
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Melissa Goldin, Mike Catalini And Ali Swenson, The Associated Press