Election Day bomb threats largely hit Democrat-leaning counties
Bomb threats sent to polling places in at least five battleground states Tuesday targeted mostly Democratic counties, an NBC News analysis has found.
Bomb threats sent to polling places and ballot-counting locations in at least five battleground states across the U.S. Tuesday targeted mostly Democratic counties, an NBC News analysis has found.
The full extent of who received the bomb threats is not clear. None are believed to have been deemed credible. NBC News compiled a list of 67 locations in 19 counties, based on local news reports and state and local election officials’ statements, all of which appear to have received similar threats. Of the 67 locations, 56 were in 11 counties that voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, including the eight most populated. Those high-population Democratic counties include voting locations for Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Detroit, Michigan; Phoenix, Arizona; Atlanta, Georgia; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Maricopa County, Arizona, which Biden won by a slim margin, has consistently been the subject of election denialism conspiracy theories. The other five — Michigan’s Wayne County, Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia County and Georgia’s DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties — were some of the largest Democratic strongholds in their respective states.
Much is still unknown about the threats, including the identity of who sent them. They do appear to have been designed to influence either the perception of the election outcome or the outcome itself, as all the threats known to NBC News were sent to the handful of battleground states widely believed by both parties to be crucial for winning the election. It’s also unclear if the threats tended to focus on urban counties because they are better known or contain more people, or because they tend to be Democratic strongholds.
“This is an extraordinary and very disturbing development,” said Larry Norden, the vice president of the elections and government program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. “Whether it’s a foreign or domestic actor that was involved, there needs to be repercussions for it.”
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