VoteBuilder, the demographic data aggregator, has proven to be the catalyst for tensions between the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
VoteBuilder is the party’s demographics engine. The service receives voter data- i.e. whether someone voted last election, who they voted for, race, gender, and address- and disseminates this information for political campaigns like Sanders’ and Hillary Clinton’s.
The advantages this information can give are enormous. A candidate without the data, for example, will have to send out volunteers door to door in every neighborhood to spread the campaign’s message. This is exhausting, time consuming, and a huge expenditure of valuable campaign resources. With VoteBuilder, on the other hand, the campaign can target homes and neighborhoods for get out the vote drives.
Sanders and Clinton have each built their own data sets in VoteBuilder, adding their campaigns’ research and data to their own files. It’s those files that are in question. At some point on December 17, the Sanders campaign was able to access the Clinton data and at least one staffer went to work downloading and possibly storing that data. Once the scandal became public, the DNC responded by cutting off the Sanders campaign’s access to their own data files. The Sanders campaign sued, predictably, citing breach of contract. The DNC wilted under unprecedented pressure from liberal activists online and restored the data service on the morning of December 19.
The Sanders campaign is spinning the data breach and subsequent fallout as a David and Goliath style battle- the Independent Senator from Vermont against Clinton and the DNC. The Clinton campaign is publicly trying to stay out of the fray, tut-tutting at the Sanders team’s “theft” of their data and trust.
The DNC played bad cop by shutting off the Sanders campaign’s access to their VoteBuilder demographic program. Access to the data is critically important for candidates. The power to control that access gives the DNC, and Chairwoman Wasserman-Schulz, a great deal of sway over prospective nominees at both the state and federal level.
Wasserman-Schulz’s antipathy for the Sanders campaign and support for the Clinton campaign have been well documented. By cutting the Sanders campaign off from Vote Builder- and in particular, from the campaigns own data in Vote Builder- Wasserman-Schulz and the DNC momentarily crossed over into a territory of behavior that approached rigging the primary.
If the DNC was this cavalier about shutting down access to VoteBuilder over a breach this time, what’s to stop them from doing it again?
Featured Image by Phil Roeder, via Flickr, available under a Creative Commons License.
