The Federal Election Commission is grappling with outages to its campaign finance filing and alert systems less than a week before the Nov. 3 general election.
“The Federal Election Commission’s electronic filing system is currently offline,” the FEC wrote in an email to at least one political committee that The Washington Sun reviewed Tuesday evening. “At this time, you cannot submit electronic reports to the FEC.”
Reuters first reported on Tuesday afternoon that a hacker or hackers had targeted the site, triggering the shutdown. The Sun has not independently confirmed the hacking incident, and the email reviewed by The Sun did not mention what caused the outages.
The FEC started investigating electronic filing system outages on Monday evening, according to the agency’s status tracker. FEC Notify, the agency’s filing alert system that flags new incoming reports to campaign operatives, lawyers, journalists and other subscribers, is also offline, according to the email reviewed by The Sun.
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The federal campaign finance regulator handles political campaign and committee reports, including financial expenditure disclosures published in the lead-up to the election. Previously filed reports are still searchable on the agency’s website.
The FEC does not administer elections, so voting itself will not be disrupted by the outage.
“To be absolutely clear: This has NOTHING to do with voter files or voter registration,” Dara Lindenbaum, one of the two Democratic FEC commissioners, wrote in a post on X. “Those are maintained by the states. The FEC only handles federal campaign finance filings.”
Reached by The Sun on Tuesday, Lindenbaum and FEC spokesperson Myles Martin declined to comment on the cause of the outage.
“At this time, we can point to the status update posted to the FEC’s website that the electronic filing system is currently offline and our IT staff are actively working to restore service,” Martin told The Sun in a statement.
Martin confirmed FEC Notify is also offline.
This wouldn’t be the first time bad actors have targeted the FEC, which has been unable to investigate complaints, issue legal guidance or carry out its enforcement mandate since May 2025 because it has too few commissioners.
Though President Donald Trump nominated two Republican commissioners in February, they have not received confirmation hearings in the Senate, leaving the agency powerless for almost the entirety of the 2026 election — the most expensive on record, according to the political advertising research firm AdImpact.
Even as the amount of money pouring into federal elections has exploded, the agency’s budget has stagnated. And in January, the FEC reported the lowest staffing levels since 1990.
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