Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s campaign on Friday threatened to take the Democratic National Committee to federal court for barring aides from accessing voter data collected and compiled by the campaign.
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The Washington Post, which first reported the data breach late on Thursday (Friday NZT) citing several party officials, said discovery of the breach ignited alarm at the DNC.
Strategically important information on voters is contained in the database, which campaigns use to decide strategy.
“Unfortunately, yesterday, the vendor once again dropped the firewall between the campaigns for some data”, the statement continued.
The breach happened after a software error at the technology company NGP VAN, which provides campaigns with voter data. Uretsky said that he was trying to “understand how badly the Sanders campaign’s data was exposed”, rather than steal confidential information from a rival campaign. On Friday, Sanders campaign spokesman Michael Briggs told CNN that accessing the data was “unacceptable” and confirmed that Uretsky had been fired.
“The leadership of the Democratic National Committee is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign”, Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, told a Washington news conference.
A member of the Sanders campaign has been fired after wrongfully accessing modeling data from the Clinton campaign. However, it’s possible that the accounts were all created by the same person.
“The DNC places a high priority on maintaining the security of our system and protecting the data on it”, Miranda said in a statement.
He added, “To the best of my knowledge, nobody took anything that would have given the (Sanders) campaign any benefit”.
Nonetheless, the DNC has restricted the campaign from being able to access the data at all.
Maintaining the master list is one of the prime responsibilities of the national party committee, particularly at a time when other outside political groups and super PACs are increasingly taking on roles once served by party committees.
News of the breach comes ahead of the Democrats’ televised debate in New Hampshire on Saturday as Sanders fights for the nomination against Clinton, the party’s front-runner.
Weaver was no less harsh in his assessment of the DNC’s decision to suspend Sanders’ access to voter data, and promised swift legal action if the decision isn’t reversed.
“Shutting down Sanders’ tools to reach voters is an infringement on democracy”, the organization said this morning. He said Sanders’ campaign didn’t report the incident to the media but relied on assurances from the vendor instead.
The now-former Sanders staffer would not comment on whether other members of his team were involved in testing the breach.
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He said the DNC instructed NGP VAN to conduct an analysis of any users who accessed the data and report back.
