FEC Outage Secures Donors’ Right To Secrecy

The Federal Election Commission restored its electronic filing system Wednesday night after a cyberattack disabled it for nearly 41 hours, ending a historic expansion of the constitutional right of wealthy political donors to enjoy a little mystery. The outage prevented super PACs and other political groups from submitting mandatory 24- and 48-hour reports during the final sprint toward the November 3 election, temporarily protecting voters from dangerous information about who was spending millions of dollars to influence them.

President Donald Trump praised the blackout as “the most transparent form of transparency,” noting that an electorate unable to see political money could not become unfairly prejudiced by knowing where political money came from. “You couldn’t see the money, which means there was nothing suspicious to see, and nobody has ever disclosed less information more beautifully,” Trump said. “The hackers, whoever they may be, gave the American people tremendous privacy from facts, and facts can be very unfair.” Campaign-finance watchdogs objected that the public lost access to crucial spending disclosures precisely as election expenditures accelerated. More than $250 million was disclosed on October 20 alone, an irresponsible volume of information for citizens already burdened with remembering which candidates were running and which ones had promised to drain the institutions financing them.

Officials emphasized that the FEC does not administer voting, meaning the outage would not prevent anyone from casting a ballot. It merely prevented voters from promptly learning which billionaires, corporations, trade groups and ideological cash laundromats had purchased the persuasive atmosphere surrounding that ballot. The restored system will now process the delayed reports, exposing donors who had nearly achieved the American dream of governing publicly while remaining privately invisible. Federal regulators confirmed that democracy functioned best during the outage, when every voter had equal access to no information and every donor enjoyed the freedom to spend without being recognized.

* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.