Banner: Members of the Georgia State Election Board at a meeting in July 2024. (Source: Arvin Temkar/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution/TNS/ABACAPRESS.COM via Reuters Connect)
Voters are already casting their ballots in the 2024 US general election, but last-minute rule changes and the legal battles around them continue in several key battleground states. The resulting uncertainty is fueling conspiracy theories alleging coordinated voter fraud and weaponization of the Department of Justice by the Democratic Party. Russian media is reproducing and attempting to amplify these claims in both Russian and English as part of its ongoing effort to undermine public trust in US electoral integrity.
On October 15, the same day that state judges blocked rule changes by the Georgia State Election Board, pravda-en.com and news-pravda.com, members of the pro-Russian “Portal Kombat” network previously identified by VIGINUM, published an English translation of a Telegram post which stated, “Georgia decided to force certification of voting results, even if cases of fraud are revealed.” The posts present the Georgia case as part of a nationwide conspiracy by Democrats and the US Department of Justice to steal the election for Vice President Kamala Harris by preventing states from addressing supposedly widespread voter fraud. In addition to claiming that Democrats rely on votes from “illegal immigrants and dead people,” the posts also repeated unfounded allegations that Californians are fraudulently registering to vote in neighboring red states and that Democrats will pad their numbers with fabricated ballots from US citizens residing overseas.
These and similar claims are circulating in Russian-language Telegram channels. Coordinated fraud using the names of dead voters is a particularly prevalent narrative, with Democrats again being depicted as culprits thwarting efforts to address the problem. For example, Rybar, a Telegram channel recognized by the US government as being operated by a Russian malign influence actor, claimed in an October 21 Telegram post:
Democrats to all appearances are counting as usual on “dead souls”- it was revealed that there are 8.4 million registered voters in Michigan’s voter lists, that’s almost 500 thousand more than the population which has the right to vote. Republicans sued over this in February, but although the suit was successful, it won’t change the situation for the 2024 election – they promise to bring order to the lists only by 2027.
The post links to and misrepresents an article from Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit news site, which had explicitly stated, “While critics say the inflated rolls are not ideal, no one is suggesting they have contributed to fraud.”
Russian sources frequently cite authentic US voices to lend credibility to their content. In mid-September 2024, the state-owned Russian news agency Sputnik published an article titled, “How to Steal an Election: US Conservatives Expose Democrats’ Playbook Ahead of 2024 Vote.” While the piece was authored by Ekaterina Blinova, a longtime contributor who previously promoted spurious claims of fraud after the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterms, it heavily quotes from an August 11 blog post by Paul Craig Roberts, who the Alliance for Securing Democracy described as “an RT regular and noted conspiracy theorist.” Treating Roberts as an authoritative source, the article depicts US elections as both historically and increasingly fraudulent. It paints legal battles over elections procedure in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina as the legal establishment fighting to preserve a corrupt system that purportedly benefits the Democratic Party.
Russia-linked outlets are also copying election conspiracies from US publications verbatim. ZeroHedge, a known promoter of conspiracy theories and Russian propaganda that republishes RT content, is actively reprinting content from fringe sources that claims the establishment is manipulating legal and electoral system to ‘steal’ the election. Examples include an article by James Bovard originally published in The American Conservative, which alleges legal efforts to protect voting rights are part of a Democrat conspiracy to enable fraud, as well as a repost of a piece from the Substack “Truth Over News,” which attacks Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensburger for opposing the changes proposed by the State Election Board. The piece accused Raffensburger and secretaries of state in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada of collaborating to enable voter fraud in all six battleground states.
Russia and its proxies will almost certainly continue to amplify false claims of voter fraud and election conspiracies even after polls close on the evening of November 5. This behavior is likely to escalate in the weeks following the election, especially in the event of a Harris victory, as the US intelligence community has assessed that Russian information operations are boosting former President Trump. The previously observed synergy between English-language conspiracy outlets, Russian propaganda for English-speaking audiences, and Russian-language pro-Kremlin media continues to fuel election disinformation at the state and national level.
Cite this case study:
Meredith Furbish, “Russia-linked media outlets amplify conspiracies about US election rule changes,” Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), October 30, 2024, https://dfrlab.org/2024/10/30/russia-outlets-amplify-conspiracies.
