The Federal Election Commission shut down electronic filing after an attempted cyber intrusion Monday night, blocking campaign-finance disclosures a week before the midterm elections.
“The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented,” the agency said in its Tuesday evening status update. It had not announced restoration.
The outage prevented campaigns and political groups from submitting 24-hour and 48-hour reports, Reuters reported. Those filings provide rapid disclosure of political contributions and spending ahead of the Nov. 3 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,” the agency’s electronic filing officer wrote in a Monday night email to compliance firms reviewed by Reuters.
The shutdown affected online web forms, electronic filing submissions and tools used by filing-software vendors, according to the agency’s status page. Campaign-finance data searches and PDFs of existing reports remained available, the FEC said Tuesday.
The FEC’s general filing guidance says electronic filers who submit paper reports instead can be treated as non-filers. The commission cannot extend filing deadlines, but it may decline to pursue administrative fines when circumstances beyond a filer’s control prevent submission.
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The agency enforces federal campaign-finance law and publishes financial disclosures. It does not administer elections; the available evidence does not establish an interruption to voting or ballot counting.
Whether the attempted intrusion resulted in unauthorized access remains unclear. The FEC has not identified an attacker, the attempted entry method or any compromised data.
The outage notice does not say when electronic filing will resume or how disclosures delayed by the shutdown will be handled.
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