US Federal Election Commission filing system knocked offline by hackers a week before elections

Washington, United States. The website of the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) was targeted by a hacker or hackers, which disrupted the agency’s system for electronic filings a week before the November 3 elections, according to an email seen by Reuters.

Agency response

The FEC said in a statement that its electronic filing system was offline and that its IT staff were working to bring the service back. The commission, which monitors spending by candidates and political committees, said users could still search its website for earlier reports. It declined to comment further on the outage.

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A status message posted by the agency said the filing system had been down since about 10 p.m. ET on Monday (0200 GMT Tuesday). The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI did not immediately respond to messages asking for comment.

Impact on voters and disclosure

The hacking attempts come a week before the midterm elections, which will decide whether President Donald Trump’s Republicans keep their majorities in Congress for the next two years. The FEC has no role in administering US elections, so the outage should not affect the ability of voters to cast ballots.

The disruption does prevent organizations from submitting the FEC’s 24-hour and 48-hour spending reports, which reveal how much political groups and others are spending on particular races.

Steven Mele, a partner at the political finance compliance firm MBA Consulting Group, said: “I’ve never seen this in 26 years.” He added that the result would be less disclosure about the elections until the problem is resolved.