Bernie Sanders’ campaign accepted responsibility for the security breach. | Getty

Data breach exposes Democrats' vulnerability

The party's purported edge depends on one vendor, which just blew it.


Bernie Sanders’ peek into the Hillary Clinton voter files may be a bigger problem for Democrats than they might think.

Despite the party’s reputed tech edge that helped Barack Obama win the White House in 2008 and 2012, Democrats are almost completely dependent on the software service company being blamed for the security breach: NGP VAN. The fiasco, which has left the party’s two leading presidential contenders sparring over access to a national voter database, suddenly bolsters longstanding warnings that relying on one giant information provider is a bad idea.

"It’s a monopoly that’s been created and forced down the throats of all Democrats,” John Phillips, co-founder of the non-partisan political data firm Aristotle, told POLITICO. "Monopolies are notorious for overcharging their customers, screwing their customers. That’s what’s been going on on the Democratic side for quite some time."

Rival vendors like Aristotle have been the most outspoken critics of the current Democratic setup, which gives the nearly 20-year old company NGP VAN sole distribution rights to the party’s valuable voter file. That database includes voting history, address and contact information for registered voters, which both the Clinton and Sanders campaign rent and then supplement with their own collection of information.

Central to the NGP VAN business model is a supposedly secure firewall that keeps any information that one campaign collects away from a rival political player. But that security system was exposed this week, NGP VAN admitted, because of a software error.

While Democratic heavyweights are scrambling to temper the fallout -- NGP VAN said it was reviewing its practices, and the DNC suspended the Sanders campaign's access to the voter file -- the breach has turned what’s typically an inside baseball story about the guts of political campaigning into a national news story involving a federal lawsuit pitting a candidate against his party’s political appartus.

The NGP VAN data breach already has prompted a quick reaction from NationBuilder, a Los Angeles-based startup founded by liberal activists but that now caters to both parties. In 2012, NationBuilder actually accused NGP VAN of spreading rumors that it was an arms dealers that might tip donors’ lists to the enemy.

In a statement Friday, NationBuilder said it isolates each customer's database from the start, so it couldn't have a glitch like the one that appears to have arisen in NGP-VAN's platform, which holds all the campaigns' data in a shared database. "Access to data that a campaign has purchased and managed should always be secure and should never be cut off," said CEO Jim Gilliam.

While Sanders’ campaign accepted responsibility for the breach, it also laid some blame at NGP VAN’s doorstep. None of this would have happened but for “the incompetence of the vendor,” argued campaign manager Jeff Weaver, who also alleged that months ago “some of our data was lost to one of the other campaigns.”

For Sanders, the stakes could hardly be higher: while the Democratic National Committee investigates the breach, his ground operation lost access to the voter data it desperately needs in the home stretch in Iowa and New Hampshire.

"Without data you're essentially running your campaign blind" because the records inform decisions about whom to target with ads and canvassing, said Kendall Tucker, the co-founder of Polis, a startup selling a get-out-the-vote app. "Campaigns will push more to own their own data in the future. It's just got to be making people nervous."

Privacy and data security are always top priorities for software companies far beyond the niche political market.

"If each campaign cannot be guaranteed total privacy and security for their data, no candidate can trust that the national party or private company handling those data won’t play favorites," said Bruce Willsie, CEO and president of L2, another non-partisan vendor. "Centralizing all of these services with a single private company places the DNC and all Democratic candidates in a risky situation."

Trying to take advantage of the attention, the Sanders campaign on Friday blasted out an e-mail accusing the DNC of favoring Clinton and urging supporters to sign a petition -- which, ironically, would generate more entries in the campaign's database.

Ken Vogel contributed to this report.

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