The Democratic presidential primary is seeing a jolt of unexpected drama, as the Bernie Sanders campaign has temporarily lost its access to the Democratic voter file after a staffer took advantage of a data breach to access the Hillary Clinton campaign’s internal voter data:
The breach occurred on Wednesday, a DNC official confirmed, through the NGP VAN, the leading technology company that allows campaigns to identify voters, as well as monitor their preferences and leanings, in what’s called the 50-state voter file. For a “brief window” — about 30 minutes, an official said — a bug in the software exposed the campaigns’ internal “voter ID” data.
During that period, the Sanders campaign discovered the breach, accessed the Clinton campaign’s data, then called the vendor to point out the flaw, according to the official. The DNC has since cut off Sanders’s access to the voter file — until his campaign officials can “prove” they’ve deleted the Clinton data.
The Sanders campaign has fired the staffer—reported by Bloomberg to be national data director Josh Uretsky—who accessed Clinton’s data, and points a finger at the vendor:
“On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns. Our campaign months ago alerted the DNC to the fact that campaign data was being made available to other campaigns,” said Briggs. “At that time our campaign did not run to the media, relying instead on assurances from the vendor.”
The loss, however temporary, of voter file data is a serious problem for a campaign, so hopefully the Sanders campaign and the DNC can get this worked out quickly.