Washington: The US Federal Election Commission's (FEC) electronic filing system has been offline since Monday night after hackers targeted the agency, Reuters reported in an exclusive, citing an email from an FEC official seen by the news agency. The FEC said in a statement that its electronic filing system was offline and its information technology staff were working to restore the service.
Source: Reuters via ANI / LatestLY
"We have a bad actor attempting to breach FEC systems. As a result, we've had to temporarily shut down our web-facing services," an FEC electronic filings officer wrote in an email to campaign compliance firms on Monday night, according to Reuters. According to the agency's incident status page, the investigation began at 10:15 p.m. ET on Monday. The FEC has not disclosed whether the attacker accessed any systems or data. In a status update at 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday, the commission said the issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) referred questions about the incident to the FEC.
The shutdown has disrupted both direct electronic filings and submissions made through commercial filing software, and the agency's FECfile+ application is also affected, according to the status page. Reports already filed remain searchable on the FEC website. What is blocked are the time-sensitive disclosures due in the campaign's final days: under FEC rules, candidate committees must report contributions of $1,000 or more received between October 15 and October 31 within 48 hours, and political action committees, party committees and other groups must report independent expenditures of $1,000 or more in a particular race within 24 hours between October 15 and November 1.
Those reports are the main window voters and journalists have into last-minute election money. Brendan Glavin, research director at the nonpartisan watchdog OpenSecrets, told Reuters that super PACs and dark-money groups have spent an average of more than $50 million a day over the past week, and that more than $250 million in spending was reported on October 20 alone. "These are the key reports that tell us what is happening," Glavin said, adding that in the last days of the election they are the only way to track where the money is being spent and who is spending it.
The outage comes in the most expensive US midterm cycle on record. Political advertising tracker AdImpact puts spending and future ad reservations at about $11.21 billion so far, surpassing the $11.2 billion spent across all races in the 2024 presidential cycle. The November 3 elections will decide control of Congress, where President Donald Trump's Republican Party holds narrow majorities in both chambers.
The disruption is not expected to affect voting itself. The FEC tracks campaign spending by candidates and political committees and enforces campaign finance law; it does not administer US elections, which are run by state and local authorities, and voters' ability to cast ballots is unaffected, Reuters reported. The agency has given no estimated time for full restoration of the filing system.