The U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) was forced to temporarily shut down its web-facing services and electronic filing system following a targeted hacking attempt.
In a statement, the FEC said that, “at this time, the FEC’s electronic filing system is currently offline and our IT staff are actively working to restore service.”
The FEC, which tracks the spending of candidates and political committees, said that users could still search the website for past reports while declining to further comment on the outage.
The outage which began late Monday evening, just one week before the November 3 midterm elections has disrupted the ability of political committees, candidates, and super PACs to submit mandatory 24-hour and 48-hour spending reports.
The agency’s electronic reporting gateway remains offline while IT staff work to restore services. While the public and media can still search historical archives for past disclosures, live campaign finance transparency has taken an immediate hit.
Federal officials and cybersecurity experts emphasize that the FEC does not administer actual elections or ballot-casting systems.
As reported, the hack will have no direct effect on voters’ ability to cast ballots on November 3.
Campaign finance compliance experts note that a shutdown of this nature during the final, high-spending sprint of a midterm cycle is unprecedented.
Political groups are currently blocked from logging late-stage independent expenditures and advertising buys, temporarily reducing real-time public oversight.
The hacking attempts come a week before the midterm elections, which will determine whether President Donald Trump’s Republicans maintain their majorities in Congress for the next two years.
The FEC does not play a role in administering US elections and the outage should have no effect on voters’ ability to cast ballots.
The outage prevents organizations from filing the FEC’s 24-hour and 48-hour spending reports, which show how much political groups and others are spending on specific races.
“I’ve never seen this in 26 years,” said Steven Mele, a partner at political finance compliance firm MBA Consulting Group. “The result is there will be less disclosure on the elections” until it’s fixed.
Federal cybersecurity entities, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI, have been monitoring the digital landscape, though a formal attribution for the breach attempt has not yet been publicly released.
