Bernie Sanders’ campaign suspended from accessing voter database

A lot will shake out between Clinton and Sanders in the next few weeks – and the bigger key will be how the two camps come together.

Shortly before Weaver spoke, the DNC sent out a message from Wasserman Schultz to its members accusing the Sanders campaign of improper conduct.

The DNC maintains an extensive list of voter information and rents it out to campaigns, which update it with their own data.

CNN quotes an unnamed aide saying the press conference will be to “answer questions about the situation involving the DNC”. But before he could do that, the DNC called him. Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs, meanwhile, said only: “We’re playing the hand we were dealt”.

The Sanders campaign said that it had fired a staff member who breached Clinton’s data. “We are as interested as anyone in making sure that the software flaws are corrected since mistakes made by the DNC’s vendor also have made our records vulnerable”.

The Sanders campaign will remain suspended until it provides the DNC with a full explanation of the episode and provides proof that any accessed data has been discarded.

In a statement, Sanders’ campaign faulted NGP VAN, the data systems vendor, for continuing to “make serious errors”. For a “brief window” – about 30 minutes, an official said – a bug in the software exposed the campaigns’ internal “voter ID” data. But the campaign insisted that responsibility for the incident lay with the vendor.

That’s in addition to a CNN/WMUR poll that showed Sanders leading in New Hampshire by 10 points – 50 to 40 percent over Clinton.

“We investigated it for a short period of time to see the scope of the Sanders campaign’s exposure and then the breach was shut down presumably by the vendor”, he said.

That’s led some liberal commentators to say that, absent further developments, the DNC needs to restore Sanders’s access to the database, fast. The person said the data represented millions of dollars invested by the Clinton campaign.

Josh Uretsky/via Facebook Josh Uretsky, former Data Director for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign fired for allegedly hacking into Hillary Clinton’s data, said he was trying to understand how a network error impacted Sanders’ data.

“The DNC places a high priority on maintaining the security of our system and protecting the data on it”, communications director Luis Miranda said.

“To the best of my knowledge, nobody took anything that would have given the campaign any benefit”, he told the network.

The campaign blamed it on an “incompetent vendor who on more than one occasion has dropped the firewall between the various Democratic candidates’ data”.

That proprietary information is supposed to be secure from other campaigns.

“This was an isolated incident, and we’re conducting a full audit to ensure the integrity of the system and reporting the findings to the DNC”, Stu Trevelyan, NGP VAN’s chief executive, said.