2016 Postmortem

MrWendel

(1,881 posts) Sat Dec 19, 2015, 07:36 PM Dec 2015

An Explanation of What Bernie Sanders Staffers Actually Did and Why It Matters

By David Atkins

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2015_12/an_explanation_of_what_bernie059035.php

After a spat lasting just over 24 hours, it appears that the top news story of the day is already resolving itself: the DNC has come to an agreement to return voter database access to the Bernie Sanders campaign after top staffers were caught snooping into the Clinton campaign’s records.

The brouhaha over this little fiasco has been intense, and made worse by the fact that only a few thousand people in the United States understand anything about the voter tools involved. Few journalists—to say nothing of armchair activists—have enough campaign and field management experience to truly understand what happened. That ignorance has led to wild accusations and silly reporting from all sides, whether from conspiratorially-minded Sanders supporters or schadenfreude-filled Republicans.

The first thing to understand is that NGPVAN is a creaky voter database system that looks, and feels like it was put together in the 1990s. It has been the mainstay of Democratic campaigns all across the country and has intense loyalty among national campaign professionals—though it should be noted that the California Democratic Party uses one of its more robust and more expensive competitors PDI (PDI, hilariously, sent an email this morning to its users with the subject line “At PDI Data Security Is Our Top Priority.”) I myself have extensive experience running campaigns on both platforms, both as a campaign consultant and as a county Democratic Party official in California.

The DNC contracts with NGPVAN, meaning that firewalls between competitive primary campaigns within NGPVAN are incredibly important. But they also have been known to fail. When that happens, campaign professionals are expected to behave in a moral and legal manner. But they would also be stupid not to, since every action taken by an NGPVAN user is tracked and recorded on the server side.

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An Explanation of What Bernie Sanders Staffers Actually Did and Why It Matters (Original Post) MrWendel Dec 2015 OP

Great article. Thank you. SunSeeker Dec 2015 #1

KICK! Cha Dec 2015 #2

I've been saying this for several days. Not sure why the denial. joshcryer Dec 2015 #3

THIS... "since every action taken by an NGPVAN user is tracked ..." uponit7771 Dec 2015 #4

Kick oasis Dec 2015 #5

SunSeeker

(51,574 posts)

1. Great article. Thank you.

Reply to MrWendel (Original post)

Sat Dec 19, 2015, 07:46 PM

Dec 2015

Interesting snippet:

It’s also quite clear that most of the statements the Sanders campaign made as the story progressed—from the claim that the staffers only did it to prove the security breach, or that only one staffer had access—were simply not true. It’s just not clear at this point whether the campaign’s comms people knew the truth and lied, or whether they were not being told the whole truth by the people on the data team who were still making up stories and excuses to cover their tracks. I suspect the latter.

In this context, it made sense for Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC to suspend the Sanders campaign’s access to the data until it could determine the extent of the damage, and the degree to which the Clinton campaign’s private data had been compromised. As it turns out the ethical breach by Sanders operatives was massive, but the actual data discovery was limited. So it made sense and was fairly obvious that the DNC would quickly end up giving the campaign back its NGPVAN access—particularly since failing to do so would be a death sentence for the campaign and a gigantic black eye to the party..