The Radical Reading Room

The Federal Election Commission’s electronic filing system experienced an outage beginning late Monday, disrupting candidates’ and political committees’ ability to submit required campaign-finance reports during the final week before the midterm elections. The commission said Tuesday that it was continuing to investigate the problem. The Washington Examiner reported that the system issues were affecting 24-hour and 48-hour reports, which cover time-sensitive campaign spending.

The outage was still an issue Tuesday, Oct. 27, according to the reports. One independent account said the FEC’s electronic filing system was offline while agency information-technology staff worked to restore service. It also reported that users could still search previously filed disclosures. The disruption therefore affected new submissions, while historical reports remained available through the website, according to that account.

The reports described the incident as a possible cyberattack or attempted breach, but the Washington Examiner’s account did not identify a cause. Another report said no formal attribution had been publicly released. The available accounts establish that the filing system was disrupted, but they do not establish who caused the outage or provide a definitive explanation for it. The FEC said it was investigating.

The affected filings are campaign-finance disclosures, not ballots or voter-registration records. A separate report noted that the FEC does not administer voting or ballot-casting systems and said the outage would not prevent voters from casting ballots. The immediate reported impact was on political organizations’ ability to submit 24-hour and 48-hour spending reports while the filing system remained unavailable; the supplied accounts do not state when service was restored.