Bot Attack Takes Colorado Election Results Site Offline

A distributed denial-of-service attack temporarily limited public access to the Colorado Secretary of State's election results webpage on election night.

Updated on Nov. 4, 2026 in Cybersecurity

Isometric editorial illustration of identical steel server cabinets in a data hall, with a cable bundle congesting into one narrow intake point. — Bot attacks briefly knocked Colorado's Secretary of State election results webpage offline on election night, with other states using the same vendor also affected. AI Illustration. Upload story photo >

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A bot attack temporarily took the Colorado Secretary of State's public-facing election results webpage offline after results began posting shortly after 7 p.m. Other states using the same vendor also appeared to have been affected, though county ballot reporting was not impacted.

Why it matters

The incident shows how public election information can be disrupted by attacks on third-party vendors, even when back-end reporting continues to function. Officials say the disruption was limited in scope, but the origin of the attack remains unknown.

The attack was a distributed denial-of-service attack aimed at the website's vendor rather than the state's own ballot reporting systems. The website now requires a captcha to access results, and the full vendor fix is still pending.

The players

Colorado Secretary of State's Office

The state office responsible for overseeing Colorado elections and publishing official results, which is working with its vendor to fully resolve the disruption.

The details

The Secretary of State's office said the attack did not affect back-end ballot reporting from counties. Other states using the same vendor appeared to have been affected, and other reporting platforms from different vendors may also have been targeted.

Tuesday night, Nov. 3, 2026: bot attack targets the Colorado election results webpage.
Shortly after 7 p.m.: results begin posting and access to the website is temporarily limited.
7:45 p.m.: the issue appears resolved and a captcha system is introduced for access.

The Tech Race

Public election websites increasingly rely on commercial vendors whose shared infrastructure can expose multiple states to the same attack at once. The captcha gate the Colorado office deployed is a common defensive tool for filtering bot traffic while keeping results publicly accessible.

Residents who want election results should expect that the state site may briefly require a captcha to load during high-traffic periods. Because county ballot reporting was not affected, results from local county websites may still be available as an alternate source.

The takeaway

Election results can be disrupted at the vendor level even when official reporting systems keep running, so checking multiple official sources helps during high-traffic nights.