Russia behind fake election video, US officials say: NPR

Board of Elections Director Tyler Burns holds a test ballot during a mail-in ballot processing demonstration at the Board of Elections office in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, on September 30, 2024. A fake video purporting to show the destruction of ballots in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, showed different envelopes and ballots than the county actually uses.

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

The fake video was quickly debunked by local election officials and the district attorney's office in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. But it still spread widely on social media, including Elon Musk's X, where it racked up hundreds of thousands of views.

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

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

The alleged video from Bucks County shows the hands of a person opening envelopes and removing and examining the ballots inside. The person tears up ballots marked for Trump and insults the former president while leaving ballots marked for Vice President Kamala Harris alone. “Vote for Harris,” the voice says at one point.

But the envelopes and ballots shown are not what the county uses for voting, the Bucks County Board of Elections said.

The video was posted by an X account that shared another video last week with false accusations against Walz that intelligence officials also attributed to Russia. The report also spread the baseless QAanon conspiracy theory.

Darren Linvill, co-director of Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub, attributed the Bucks County video to a Russian propaganda operation called “Storm-1516,” first identified by Clemson and known for its tactic of producing staged videos, which she then carried out money laundering through influencers and fake news outlets.

“The specific video about Bucks County came from an account that we were aware of,” Linvill said. “There have been stories about Storm-1516 before.”

He said the operation had consistent “tells,” including a focus on Wedge themes, the use of certain actors and “stylistic elements of their videos that suggest to us that these things are certainly not authentic.”

Microsoft has said that the same Russian Storm 1516 operation was also behind a staged video falsely accusing Harris of injuring someone in a hit-and-run in 2011, which was distributed through a website purporting to be a local one television station from San Francisco. There is no evidence that such an incident took place and the alleged television station does not exist.

NPR's Miles Parks contributed to this story.