The American voter is still being subjected to psychological warfare. At first there were warnings of bomb threats, ballot box fires, and disruptions on Election Day. Now the psywar terror campaign is extended to the certification process, the Electoral College vote, the inauguration and beyond. The repository of Anglophile geopolitics called the Atlantic Council insisted in an article published on Nov. 5 that the “bad actors” of Russia, China, and Iran are out to target the American voter and “to erode Americans’ faith in democratic institutions and heighten chaos and social division,” they quote researcher Kenton Thibaut. The Atlantic Council quotes Director of strategy and resident senior fellow at the DFRLab Emerson Brookings that “By sheer volume, foreign interference in the 2024 U.S. election has already surpassed the scale of adversarial operations in both 2016 and 2020.”
To further its drumbeat, the FBI put out a statement about fake bomb threats at U.S. polling places on Nov. 5: “The FBI is aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains. None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far.” The U.S. government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly gave a press briefing calling the fake bomb threats “outrageous,” but said that it did not prevent anyone from voting and called it a “good-news story for democracy.” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes went so far as to charge that there were several bomb threats in his state, and said, “this comes from one of our foreign enemies, namely Russia.” Many officials went on record in a report by intelligence asset, Washington Post reporter Joseph Menn facilitating splashy headlines.
The Washington Post article, however, dismissed these threats, since by Election Day most American voters already decided for whom they would vote. The best opportunity for disruptions, they suggested, would be after the elections during the certification period or the actual inauguration. The Post quotes former U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director Chris Krebs as saying: “They likely realize they can’t really make people change behaviors at the polls. If chaos is the point, the most opportune window to create mischief is the post-November 5th pre-certification period.” The Post concludes, “the disruptions could get worse over the next two months.”
