Hack attempt forces FEC to pause electronic campaign finance filings before Nov. 3

An attempted hack forced the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to take parts of its online services offline, temporarily stopping the electronic filing of campaign donations and expenditures one week before the U.S. congressional elections on November 3, 2026.

FEC says filings paused; previously filed records remain public

The disruption began on the evening of October 26 (U.S. time), when the FEC disabled some internet-facing systems after detecting an intrusion attempt. In a message sent to companies that help political organizations submit finance reports the agency warned: "We have a malicious actor who is attempting to breach FEC systems." Electronic filing was rendered unavailable, although reports that had already been submitted stayed accessible to the public.

The outage comes at a sensitive moment: rules require certain donations and election-related expenditures to be reported within 24 or 48 hours, with a disclosure threshold for some filings set at $1,000. Those near-real-time disclosures allow the public to track who is financing campaigns and how much is being spent immediately before the vote.

Industry and transparency experts warned of the consequences. "I've never seen anything like this in 26 years," said Steven Mele, director of MBA Consulting Group, which advises on campaign finance rules, adding that the interruption will reduce the availability of up-to-the-minute funding data until systems are restored. Brendan Glavin, director of research at the nonpartisan organization OpenSecrets, noted that independent political committees and groups whose donors are not fully public have recently averaged more than $50 million in daily spending, and that on October 20 reported expenditures topped $250 million.

The FEC said it does not have legal authority to extend statutory filing deadlines, but that it will not seek administrative fines for late submissions caused by the outage if reports arrive within 24 hours after services are restored. Agency officials also stressed the incident does not affect voting: the FEC oversees federal campaign finance, not the voter registration systems handled by the states.

In its latest update on the evening of October 27 the commission said the problem had been identified and a fix was under way. So far there has been no public confirmation that any data were accessed and the identity of the attackers remains unknown.

Photo: press material from the event