US: Russia lags behind fake video on Pennsylvania balloting

The video, which had millions of views on platforms like X, showed up on social networks on October 24th, showing a person controlling the ballots in Pennsylvania's Bucks County and scraping votes for Trump.

The man, who was colored, seemed to have been tearing up the ballots for the republican candidate, while leaving the ballot papers intact for Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris, who is a colored person.

“The intelligence community estimates that Russian actors have produced this video that falsely shows a person by stealing votes in Pennsylvania, based on data that has had the community access to intelligence and preliminary activities of other influential Russian actors, including video and other dezination activities”, the National Intelligence Director's Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Agency for Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security said through a joint statement.

The statement said that within three hours local authorities denied this video, as citizens reported it to the authorities.

“This Russian activity is part of Moscow's broader effort to raise unstable doubts about the integrity of the American elections and promote division among Americans”, the statement said.

Analysts monitoring Moscow's foreign influence campaigns had earlier linked this video to a Russian propaganda group known as Storm-1516 or CopyCop.

Observers said Storm-1516, which had previously published several false content videos regarding Harris' candidate for vice president, Tim Walz, is a branch of the Internet Research Agency, a former Russian propaganda network based in St Petersburg, which was founded by Yevgeny Pigoz, the late leader of the Russian mercenary group, Wagner.

The American Intelligence Community warned that more dezinforms and propaganda orchestrated by Russia could appear before the November 5th elections. /Radio Europe Free