On Thursday evening, the DNC announced that they are cutting off the Sanders campaign’s access to its comprehensive 50-state voter file that lists voter patterns and preferences, which effectively halts their ability to reach out to voters.
They claim that during a 30-minute glitch in NGP VAN, the vendor that handles the DNC’s voter data, the firewall went down and a low-level Sanders staffer gained access to Clinton’s notes in the database.
The staffer was promptly fired, though he claims that he had only looked to see how badly Sander’s own data was breached during the firewall outage.
In a statement on Friday, responding to what Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver called an active “attempt to undermine the campaign,” Weaver put his foot down and stated that if the DNC continues to hold their data hostage, they will take action by the afternoon.
“We are announcing today that if the DNC continues to hold our data hostage, and continues to try to attack the heart and soul of our campaign, we will be in federal court this afternoon seeking an immediate injunction,” Weaver wrote in his statement.
Weaver maintains that the DNC is responsible, as they continuously allowed these firewall failures to occur, even after being alerted by the Sanders’ campaign of the issue in October.
He also demanded that the information stored in the database that the campaign has collected belongs to them and not the DNC.
“This is unacceptable. Individual leaders of the DNC can support Hillary Clinton in any way they want, but they are not going to sabotage our campaign – one of the strongest grassroots campaigns in modern history.”
A petition by infuriated supporters who are crying foul calls to reinstate Sanders’ access to the database. It was launched on Moveon.org following the DNC’s announcement, and had already reached 146,859 signatures by Friday afternoon.
In addition to wanting their database back, the Sanders campaign also stated that they want to see an independent audit of the DNC’s handling of data and its security from the beginning.
