Looking back at the 2024 American presidential election, the vote itself produced a historic result: Donald Trump, returned to the White House for a second term. Around that contest, though, sits a thick paper trail of accusations — aimed variously at Russia, Iran and China, with Moscow, notably, the recurring name. US officials had spent two prior cycles accusing the Kremlin of trying to tilt elections in Trump’s favour, and Russian officials spent the same period denying it. The record assembled in 2024, most of it official, is extensive; the honest caveat, as observers noted at the time, is that the real impact of any of it remains genuinely hard to weigh.
Begin with election day itself. Polling stations in Georgia received several “non-credible” bomb threats that originated in Russia, in the account of Brad Raffensperger, the state’s Republican secretary of state. The false threats, he told reporters, disrupted voting at 12 polling places across Fulton, Gwinnett and DeKalb counties — three jurisdictions ringing Atlanta with large Black communities.
In the days before the vote, the ODNI, the FBI and CISA had jointly claimed Moscow was accelerating its interference work. Russia, the security agencies said, sought to “undermine public confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections and stoke divisions among Americans.” The alleged products included manufactured videos and fake articles — sowing fear about the process, implying Americans were attacking each other over politics, and amplifying the false claim that US officials meant to rig the vote across swing states through ballot stuffing and cyberattacks.
Two viral clips did the most travel. US intelligence officials said they believed Russia stood behind a fake video of a man posing as a Haitian immigrant flashing multiple IDs and claiming he and a friend had voted repeatedly for Kamala Harris in Georgia; Raffensperger called it “obviously fake” and built to spread doubt about the state’s voting. And in late October, the three agencies jointly debunked a video purporting to show ballots marked for Trump burning in Pennsylvania, writing that Russian actors had manufactured and amplified it. “This Russian activity is part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the U.S. election and stoke divisions among Americans, as detailed in prior ODNI election updates,” that statement read.
Then there was the money. On Sept. 4, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging two Russian nationals tied to the Kremlin-funded network RT with laundering millions of dollars to Tenet Media, a right-wing media company. Prosecutors alleged the founders, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, a married couple, knew precisely where the money came from and hid it; RT employees, they said, instructed the pair to recruit a media personality as the “face” of the outfit. Six right-wing influencers were approached — Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin among them, per the Columbia Journalism Review — and those who signed on could receive up to $400,000 per month for original content.
September also brought seizures. The Justice Department took 32 web domains in a bid to disrupt a Russian influence operation known as “Doppelganger.” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco identified SDA, Structura and ANO Dialog — three Russian firms — as having relied on cybersquatting — digital mimicry of outlets like The Washington Post and Fox News, as Politico reported — along with fabricated influencers and fake profiles “to promote AI-generated false narratives on social media.” “Those narratives targeted specific American demographics and regions in a calculated effort to subvert our election,” Monaco added. Court documents put Kremlin domestic policy chief Sergei Kiriyenko at the operation’s centre.
On the technology: an ODNI official, speaking anonymously to reporters in late September, said Russia was churning out more AI-generated election content than any other country — material described to Reuters as “consistent with Russia’s broader efforts to boost the former president’s [Trump] candidacy and denigrate the vice president [Harris] and the Democratic Party, including through conspiratorial narratives.”
The production line had names. Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center traced Storm-1516, a Russian propaganda actor, turning out inauthentic videos from late August implicating Harris and her running mate Tim Walz in invented conspiracies — one staging an attack by supposed Harris supporters on a Trump rally attendee, and another hiring a paid actor to allege a 2011 hit-and-run that left a girl paralysed. NBC News counted at least 50 false narratives from the group in a year, typically built on faked primary sources. Hany Farid, a digital forensics professor at the University of California Berkeley, found signs of AI manipulation in several of the videos. “Could they make better videos? Sure,” he shrugged. But “these videos basically work. You don’t have to make Hollywood-style fake videos to get people to start doubting everything.” Vice President-elect JD Vance, for his part, appears to have shared Storm-1516 material unwittingly when he repeated the false claim that Ukrainian leaders had spent US aid money on yachts. A sibling outfit, Storm-1679, posted two videos of conspiracy claims about Harris’s policies, one drawing more than 100,000 views on X.
And the bounty. In October, the FBI offered $10 million for information on anyone “knowingly engaged or is engaging in interference in U.S. elections,” singling out Rybar, the pro-war Russian Telegram channel linked to the late Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin. Rybar’s founder, Mikhail Zvinchuk, denied any interference in the race to The Washington Post, casting his work as “defending” Russia’s “information borders” — while also boasting of a “worldwide” network of more than 250 channels in 28 languages.
For all the noise, the salient point survives the retrospect: nothing in the record touched the counting of votes. What the documents, seizures and indictments describe is a campaign against the voter — confidence, division, doubt — rather than against the ballot. It was loud, it was industrial, and judging whether it moved anyone remains, even now, a matter for careful minds rather than confident ones.
