'Bad actor' attempts to breach FEC, knocking campaign filing system offline

The Federal Election Commission's electronic filing system has been offline since Monday night after what the agency called an attempt by a "bad actor" to breach its systems, a week before the midterm elections.

The Federal Election Commission's electronic filing system went down around 10 p.m. ET on Monday after an attempted breach, Reuters reported, citing an email in which an FEC electronic filings officer told compliance firms: "We have a bad actor attempting to breach FEC systems."

By Tuesday evening, a status message said the issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented, but the filing system remained offline. The FEC said its "IT staff are actively working to restore service." The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI referred questions to the FEC.

Voting booths at a polling station in Washington, D.C., in November 2024 (archive)

The outage prevents campaigns and outside groups from submitting the 24-hour and 48-hour reports that disclose spending on specific races in the final weeks before the Nov. 3 elections. Past reports can still be searched on the FEC website, and the agency noted that it does not run elections, so voting should not be affected.

"I've never seen this in 26 years," said Steven Mele, CEO of MBA Consulting Group. Brendan Glavin of OpenSecrets called the outage "a big deal," since the reports are the main way to track late spending. AdImpact estimates that a record of about $11.21 billion has been spent on the 2026 midterms so far.