Hackers Force FEC to Shut Down Campaign Filing System a Week Before Midterms

Hackers tried to break into the Federal Election Commission’s computer systems Monday night, forcing the agency to take its electronic filing system offline one week before the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

“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 several campaign compliance firms that night. Reuters first reported the email Tuesday.

The agency confirmed the outage but not the cause. “At this time, the FEC’s electronic filing system is currently offline and our IT staff are actively working to restore service,” the commission said in a statement, adding that the public could still search past reports. It declined further comment.

A status message posted by the FEC said the system had been down since about 10 p.m. ET Monday. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency referred questions to the FEC, and the FBI did not immediately respond.

Caught early, insider says

A person familiar with the internal investigation told Politico that FEC cybersecurity staff “noticed attempted intrusions and were able to shut down” the parts of the filing system under attack. “It’s quite narrow and compartmentalized,” the person said. “The team noticed it early, and it will hopefully be resolved shortly.” Some systems remained down Tuesday evening.

No successful breach of campaign data has been reported, and it is not known who was behind the attempt.

Disclosure goes dark at the worst time

The FEC does not run elections or count ballots, so the outage has no effect on voting. But it blocks the 24-hour and 48-hour reports that show, almost in real time, how much outside groups are spending on specific races in the closing days.

“I’ve never seen this in 26 years,” said Steven Mele, president of the compliance firm MBA Consulting Group. “The result is there will be less disclosure on the elections” until the system is fixed.

The timing magnifies the gap. Political ad tracker AdImpact puts spending on advertising and future reservations this cycle at roughly $11.21 billion, already past the $11.2 billion record set in 2024, a presidential year.

Brendan Glavin, research director at the campaign watchdog OpenSecrets, said super PACs and dark money groups have averaged more than $50 million a day over the past week, with more than $250 million reported on Oct. 20 alone.

“It’s a big deal,” Glavin said. “These are the key reports that tell us what is happening. In the last days of the election this is the only way for us to keep track of where the money’s being spent” and who is spending it.

Questions for the agency

The incident adds to a crowded list of election-security worries in the final stretch. The Justice Department is deploying monitors to polling places nationwide, while the Democratic Party has stood up its own cybersecurity unit to track deepfakes and misinformation.

It also leaves open questions the FEC has not answered: how the intruders were detected, whether any filer data was exposed, and when campaigns and committees will be able to file again.

For now, voters trying to follow the money in the most expensive midterm in history will have to wait.

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