WASHINGTON — The Federal Election Commission’s electronic filing system remained offline Wednesday after a reported hacking attempt forced the agency to shut down web-facing services less than a week before the November 3 midterm elections.
The disruption does not affect voter registration, polling places, ballots or vote counting. The FEC regulates federal campaign finance; state and local election officials administer voting.
The outage matters because candidates, political committees and outside groups are required to file rapid reports disclosing certain last-minute campaign spending. With those reports delayed, voters, journalists and watchdog organizations temporarily lose a key source for tracking who is paying to influence competitive races.
Agency says a fix is being implemented
The FEC’s website said its electronic filing system was offline and that staff were working to restore service. The agency’s incident page said Tuesday evening that the problem had been identified and a fix was being implemented.
The incident began at approximately 10:15 p.m. Eastern time Monday, October 26, according to the status page. It affects online forms, the electronic submission system and filing tools used by campaign-finance software vendors. Previously filed campaign-finance reports remain searchable on the FEC website.
Reuters reported that an FEC electronic-filings officer told campaign compliance firms that a “bad actor” was attempting to breach agency systems, prompting the temporary shutdown. The FEC has publicly confirmed the outage but has not announced who may be responsible, whether any system was successfully breached or whether data was accessed.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI referred questions to the FEC, Reuters reported.
Last-minute spending disclosures interrupted
Federal rules require committees and other political spenders to report some independent expenditures within 24 or 48 hours during the period immediately before an election. Those disclosures show how much is being spent, which races are being targeted and who is financing the advertising.
Campaign-finance specialists told Reuters the timing was especially serious because political spending accelerates during the final week. Political advertising spending and future reservations for the 2026 midterms had reached approximately $11.21 billion, according to AdImpact data cited by Reuters, narrowly surpassing the 2024 record.
OpenSecrets research director Brendan Glavin said super PACs and dark-money groups had averaged more than $50 million in spending per day during the preceding week. More than $250 million was reported on October 20 alone.
Super PACs may accept unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations and other groups. Some nonprofit organizations involved in political advocacy do not publicly disclose their donors, producing the “dark money” label. The FEC’s rapid-report system gives the public at least a near-real-time view of where many of those dollars are being deployed.
What the outage does—and does not—mean
The FEC is not part of the systems used to register voters or cast and count ballots. The outage therefore should not prevent anyone from voting in the November 3 election.
It also does not, by itself, establish that campaign records were stolen or altered. Officials have not disclosed evidence of data loss, and attribution of cyber incidents often takes time.
The immediate harm is to campaign-finance transparency. Until electronic filing resumes and delayed reports are processed, voters may have less timely information about the money behind advertisements and independent spending in the closing days of the election.
Sources: Federal Election Commission and Reuters.
