The data breach dispute consuming the Democratic Party today is pretty confusing. According to the Washington Post’s initial reporting on this late Thursday night, the Sanders campaign admitted to “improperly accessing confidential voter information gathered by the rival campaign of Hillary Clinton” in VAN, the software most Democratic campaigns use to keep track of voters. VAN is the central information organ of a campaign, its version of a CRM or EHR system. A campaign without VAN is a fleet without radar.
The DNC responded to the breach by cutting off the Sanders campaign’s access to VAN, a catastrophic blow. By Friday afternoon, Sanders had sued the DNC for breach of contract and played down its own culpability in the situation, placing primary blame on NGP, the vendor that maintains VAN.
Did Sanders staffers actually steal data from Hillary’s campaign? Or did some of Hillary’s data just pop up on their computer screens without them realizing what it was? Amid the fighting words and news stories written by people who have no idea what campaign staffers actually do all day, it’s hard to tell where on that spectrum their actions lie. But I was once a campaign staffer that used VAN all day, and I’m pretty sure I know what exactly happened.
After this story broke, NGP, the maker of VAN, issued a statement saying that "for voters that a [Sanders staffer] already had access to, that user was able to search by and view (but not export or save or act on) some attributes that came from another campaign.” This statement points to a distinction between two databases within VAN: “My Voters,” and “My Campaign.”
My Voters is the general voter file that both campaigns have access to. But once you identify voters you want to keep track of, because they are targets for turnout efforts, likely volunteers, or something else, you import their records into My Campaign, a database that only your campaign has access to, to keep track of your contact history with those voters, and to save sets of search attributes or static lists for strategic purposes — for example, if you wanted to save a dynamic search of people whose contact history has attributes that make them particularly weak supporters.
When you’re logged into VAN, you can access both databases, but there is a firewall between them, so you can only be working out of one or the other at any given time. If you’re in My Voters, the interface is colored in shades of blue; in My Campaign, the interface is tan colored. Data does not copy back and forth when you update the same voter's profile in one of the other.
Let’s imagine there is registered Democrat in New Hampshire named George W. Boehner. George is 55 years old and lives at 123 Brown Street. This year, George has been called by two Hillary volunteers, and had one come to his door. In the first two calls, he said he really liked Hillary but that he wasn’t paying much attention to the election yet, and the callers noted this information in VAN. When a canvasser came to his door a few months later, he said that he was now leaning towards Hillary, and would probably vote for her; however, he also said that he was now paying close attention to the election, and was intrigued by what Sanders was saying about income inequality.
George's demographic information lives in My Voters. Both Hillary and Bernie’s campaigns can see that he is a registered Democrat who voted in 2012, is 55, and lives at 123 Brown Street. But the information about his voting preferences and issues he cares about live in My Campaign. Only Hillary should be able to see that information, because if the Sanders campaign sees it, they would know that he is a soft Hillary supporter and potentially could be persuaded to vote for Bernie.
NGP’s above statement is true — Dick Boehner is a voter profile that both campaigns already had access to. However, the “some attributes that came from another campaign” likely constitutes the critical information contained in My Campaign. So I think Sanders staffers probably found themselves with access to some of Hillary’s campaign’s saved searches in My Campaigns. These would have been so obviously labelled that Sanders’ team should have immediately known not to click on them, let alone save them as static lists in their own personal folders, as they apparently did. So while I don’t think Team Sanders committed outright theft, they are clearly at fault.
The DNC acted out of turn by immediately revoking Sanders’ access to the voter file — according to their contract, the Sanders campaign should have had 10 days to correct any breach before having its access revoked. Debbie Wasserman-Schulz wanted to give Sanders a public humiliation, and ended up embarrassing herself.
But the statements the Sanders team has given trying to place the blame entirely on NGP — as if the data being made available to them means that they had a right to look at it —are ridiculous. If you find a duffle bag of money on your front porch that you know isn’t yours and you turn the money in, you haven’t done anything wrong. But if you take the money out of the bag and start counting it on your dinner table and thinking about ways that you might spend it, you’re both a complete idiot and ethically culpable. And the campaign’s effort to turn its own crime into a “the Establishment is trying to tear down the little guy” narrative is as cynical as they come. Appropriately so, for a campaign that is trying to win. But for a candidate who portrays himself as the fearless truth-teller, it tastes sour.
I hope that we’ll learn in more detail over the coming days about who clicked where, who told them to do so, and what data they saw, and whether they still have any of it. And I hope that those facts determine the outcome of this street fight.