Jun. 18—GRAND FORKS — Julie Fedorchak‘s campaign has filed complaints with the Federal Communication Commission and Federal Election Commission following a series of text messages on primary election day that said that she had dropped out when she in fact had not.

The texts were sent to voters across the state, including Fedorchak’s family and friends, the morning of the primary where Fedorchak won the Republican

nomination for North Dakota’s U.S. House seat

. According to campaign lawyer Shane Goettle, both the FEC and FCC have received the complaint, notified the U.S. attorney’s office and are pursuing all avenues of legal action.

“We think thousands of North Dakota voters receive misleading and false text messages stating that Julie Fedorchak had withdrawn,” Goettle said. “We don’t know who was behind it. We do know that they rotated through a series of different numbers all with the 701 area code to make it look like they’re originating out of North Dakota.”

At a press conference on June 11,

Fedorchak denounced the text messages.

“This is at minimum election fraud,” Fedorchak said. “It’s a desperate tactic to influence and discourage voters.”

At that time she said her campaign would be filing a complaint with the FEC. The complaints were sent last week and notification of receipt was given yesterday. Fedorchak’s campaign manager Sean Cleary said they don’t want this to happen again.

“These false and misleading texts interfered with our election process, and we look forward to the relevant federal entities investigating the matter further so that this doesn’t happen in North Dakota again,” Cleary said in an email.

Fedorchak won the primary with 46% of the vote. She’ll face Democrat candidate Trygve Hammer in November. Before the Fedorchak texts, there was a series of texts sent to voters on June 10 encouraging Democrats to vote in the Republican primary, which the Democratic-NPL primary denounced. In North Dakota, party candidates need to receive at least as many votes as they received signatures to be placed on the November ballot, which could be an issue if not enough democrats voted for candidates for state office.

“We don’t want to see this happen in any election to any candidate of any party whether that’s Republican, Democrat, independent or third party,” Goettle said. “We’re concerned that if we don’t take a stand now that we’re just going to see more of this.”