Minutes after Senator Collins announced her support for Kavanaugh the site to fund her opponent was so overwhelmed that it crashed

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Senator Susan Collins

• A website collecting money to fund a rival to Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) has crashed on Friday shortly after she announced her support for confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court.
• The site was created to raise money for whoever decides to challenge Collins for her Senate seat in 2020.

Minutes after Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) announced her decision to vote in favor of confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court, a site raising money for Collins' as-yet-unnamed-and-unknown political opponent in her next election crashed.

Collins was one of the big undecided votes in the judge's controversial nomination. In an effort to convince Collins that there would be consequences if she voted to support him, a group of people from Maine launched a crowdfunding campaign on a site called Crowdpac.com.

The campaign asked people to pledge money to back whoever challenged Collins in her 2020 election if she voted in favor of Kavanaugh. If she didn't vote for Kavanaugh, then the pledges would be void.

It isn't 100% clear why the site crashed but one possible explanation is that it was so overwhelmed with people rushing to donate to the campaign that the website's internet connection couldn't take the traffic which pushed it offline. It is also possible some other reason caused the crash. Denial of service attacks are a common method that hackers used to overwhelm websites, for instance.

Business Insider verified that the site was down and Crowdpac didn't immediately answer our request for comment.

As of September 12, when the Wall Street Journal reported on this fundraising effort, it had already raised more than $1 million from 37,000 pledges. There were some questions whether this fundraising effort would violate federal bribery statutes, which prohibit giving or offering anything of value to government officials in exchange for any acts or votes.

According to Twitter user, Marty Loughlin, right before the site crashed on Friday, it had raised $2 million in pledges.
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Another page that vows to support whoever the Democrat will be for Collins' seat is still up and accepting donations, though it's not clear how many donations it has racked up.

In September, a spokesperson for Collins told the WSJ that she wouldn't be swayed by the fundraising tactic in any case. "Senator Collins will make up her mind based on the merits of the nomination. Threats or other attempts to bully her will not play a factor in her decision making whatsoever."