The Democratic National Committee is Playing Dirty Politics

Why we Demand a Truly Independent Audit of the DNC

As everyone knows, it’s been a rollercoaster of an election season already, and it’s only just the beginning of 2016. We’ve seen all kinds of dirty politics in the last year, but there is one situation that should stand out above all the rest. The Democratic National Committee (from here on referred to as the DNC), has consistently gone out of its way to deny the American people a true democratic choice, undermining the name of their own party. They have scheduled debates at times no one will see them, they have publicly vilified one of their own candidates likely as a way to push another, and their solution to the problems are to hire a company that has a notorious history of ethically and morally dubious business practices to audit their campaign. We think this issue is highly important in a serious democracy, because it takes away the citizens’ ability to really choose their own Democratic candidate, instead having the candidate chosen for them.

The frustrations of Democratic voters began to rise once the DNC released their public primary debate schedule. Compared to twenty-eight debates in 2008, this year we were treated to a total of six. While we can agree that there were far more primary candidates in 2008, something about the low number and the times of the debates felt fishy to many. Not only were they few and far between, but they were also all scheduled on nights where television viewership was guaranteed to be low. On top of this there are new DNC rules which barred candidates from taking part in any debates not sanctioned by the DNC directly. A rule that, if broken, would effectively bar a candidate from taking part in any more DNC-sanctioned debates as well. When cries for more debates began to spring up, people began to sense that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairman of the DNC, was doing this to support her friend Hillary Clinton, especially when information started spreading that Wasserman Schultz had been Clinton’s campaign co-chair in 2008. Candidate Martin O’Malley himself said of the limited debates: “I want to say right off the bat here, that to those in Washington who think they can limit the number of debates, they’re gonna have another thing coming when they talk to the people of Iowa. Because these are the issues about which we need to have not just one debate, not just two, but many debates. Because those debates will shape the future of the country we give our kids. Don’t you agree?” People began to feel this way even more after Wasserman Schultz shut down a valid motion to consider more debates by a DNC co-chair, claiming that only she had the authority to touch on the subject and that the co-chair’s motion was “out of order.” It later emerged that she herself was the one “out of order” on that day, that the co-chair’s motion was valid, and her dismissal of the motion was invalid. When hundreds chanted for more debates at a public appearance, Wasserman Schultz ignored their pleas and talked about how we had to fight the Republicans, ignoring the way she was personally splitting her party at the seams by ignoring their pleas.

The feelings of impropriety began to grow exponentially when Debbie Wasserman Schultz went on multiple news programs to “expose” the Sanders campaign for looking into Clinton data via a voter information program provided by the company NGP VAN. The reason many felt it was improper was because she had lashed out at one of her own candidates and her story would end up being refuted by the very logs that NGP VAN would later produce themselves. Not only had the head of the DNC gone on national television to vilify one its own candidates, but the whole story was not being told. This was the smell of blood in the water for many people in the tech industry. It had that familiar sting of “report a bug, get blamed for the bug,” that so many in the tech community experience when dealing with corporate heads who don’t understand IT security and are unwilling to take IT security seriously. Too many had been down that same road themselves to sit by idly and just let this side of the story not be told.

Which brings us to Josh Uretsky, National Data Director for the Sanders campaign, who had come to the campaign at the advice of both NGP VAN and the DNC. Josh Uretsky accessed Clinton voter “modeling data” along with three other members of the Sanders team, something Wasserman Schultz took great pains to present as purposefully unethical. However, because of an authorization bug that was created by NGP VAN’s update to their software system, Uretsky was able to query the Clinton summary data for roughly forty-five minutes, and was doing so because he was worried their own data was equally exposed. Uretsky has said, “We knew there was a security breach in the data, and we were just trying to understand it and what was happening”. The Sanders campaign then fired Uretsky and the DNC suspended the Sanders campaign from the NGP VAN system, which stores all the Democratic voter files. This stopped the Sanders campaign from being able to access commonly-held voter contact data, and more importantly additional data gathered by their own volunteers. Sanders and his campaign filed a lawsuit, and after several hours of online outcry, their access was restored. The outcry was mostly focused on the lack of transparency from the DNC and NGP VAN, and many questions as to why the chair of the DNC would go on national television and try to destroy one of the candidates of her own party, especially when the actual story of what happened was much more pedestrian and mundane than the “theft” story sold by Wasserman Schultz on multiple major news media programs. To many, it reeked of trying to shut down Sanders for the benefit of Clinton. Whether or not that is the case, it leaves plenty of Democrats with a sour taste in their mouths. It even moved former candidate Jim Webb, who had at this point dropped out of the race, to tweet “Good for Bernie. The DNC is nothing more than an arm for the Clinton campaign.” in response to Sanders’ suit against the DNC.

The Sanders campaign’s lawsuit included stipulations for a third-party audit of both the DNC and NGP VAN, as well as both the Sanders and Clinton campaigns. While the DNC has trotted out their third-party auditor, Kroll, many are pointing to a history of Kroll producing results that are favorable to those who hire them, and not always truthfully. (At the moment, it is unclear as to whether the Sanders campaign has agreed to Kroll as the auditor, as their suit stipulates the auditor must be agreed upon by both parties.) Kroll was accused of stealing emails and engaging in unlawful electronic surveillance in Brazil, but was never prosecuted. Agents for Kroll have admitted to dumpster-diving through shredded documents once the documents were on public property. Journalist Mary Cuddehe writing for the Atlantic in 2010 described her experience with Kroll, with Kroll attempting to hire her as a spy masquerading as a journalist to gather information against the local populace who was suing their client, Texaco, for wantonly polluting the country with oil spills for twenty years. When Kroll investigated the University of Texas for a backdoor program to admissions for the wealthy and politically connected, their investigation found a tenth of the students that actually abused this program. According to a reconstruction of Kroll’s own data, they had been “…establishing an arbitrary cutoff point for grades and SAT scores that had nothing to do with finding the total number of admissions rejections Powers overrode, which was the original purpose of the investigation.” The University had hired them to investigate the University, and they arbitrarily reduced the number of students who actually been accepted into the school (despite initially being denied), one can only guess for the benefit of making the University of Texas look better in the outcome of the investigation. Perhaps not always illegal, but all of these activities point to a highly ethically dubious record. A company that has a checkered history in terms of actually being “unbiased” towards those who hire it has left many Democrat voters with uneasy questions as to why this firm was chosen to be the auditor by the DNC. Is this just another ploy to give Clinton a coronation? Maybe, maybe not, but it sure leaves plenty of potential Democratic voters with a lot of reasonable questions for the DNC.

Those of us with questions have tried to look deeper, and what we see disturbs us. As we can see in Fig. 1, there are a lot of deep connections between people in the DNC, people in the campaign for Hillary Clinton, the people in NGP VAN, and Hillary Clinton herself. While on one hand, it is quite likely that such connections are simply the result of decades of cultivation of the Democratic Party started by Bill Clinton and his “New Democrats” in the early 90’s. Of course, Hillary Clinton is a Democrat, she’s been a Senator and the Secretary of State, why wouldn’t she have connections to other key Democrats in her party? On the other hand, such close connections between key people in this situation can begin to make one uncomfortable when considering all the other evidence which potentially points to collusion for the purpose of getting Hillary Clinton to win the nomination, and to limit the amount of choice Democratic voters have in their candidate. The DNC, under the leadership of Debbie Wasserman Schultz has scheduled primary debates to garner as few viewers as possible, had Grassroots Clinton field offices co-located at DNC offices, shut off the Sanders campaign’s access to the voter database, and lined up superdelegates for Clinton before first debate. In addition, a DNC finance chair was caught raising money for Hillary Clinton, which is directly against the DNC rules. All of the issues addressed here do not paint a picture of a DNC that is unbiased and not attempting to influence the primary.

Perhaps the DNC thinks they are doing us a favor, fearing for an inevitable takeover by Republicans if someone other than Clinton gets the nomination, wanting to push the party and nation in the “correct” direction, the one that will result in another Democratic president and not a Republican. The question at that point becomes this: is it really okay for a small elite to make decisions about national politics for us? Is it okay for us to choose who to vote for dictated by fear of the opposing party instead of the real issues affecting us? Is it okay for our party to take part in sneaky, underhanded, and unethical tactics for the purpose of making the decision for us, because they “know what’s good for us better than we do?” If our party is indeed trying to make the decision for us, we have to ask ourselves, do they really know what’s good for us, better than we do?

If your answer to all of these questions is a resounding “no!” then we ask you to join us in demanding a real, legitimate, third party audit of the DNC. Our government spends a good deal of time chastising other countries for unethical elections with dirty politics, so we must hold our government and our political parties to account. We must make our own elections legitimate. Please sign any and all of these petitions, demanding a real audit of the DNC, NGP VAN, and both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns.

We also want to reach out to the campaigns of both Sanders and O’Malley, their supporters, and also the former candidates and their supporters. Every single one of these candidates has been systematically marginalized for the benefit of Clinton, and if you were a supporter of any of them, we hope you are as angry as we are. We hope we can count on you, the American people, to spread the word and to not let an elite few dictate our future. The elite controlling our politics is an issue both Sanders and O’Malley speak about, and we hope we can count on their campaigns to make public statements that they stand behind us in demanding a fair, balanced, unbiased audit of the DNC, NGP VAN, and all the campaigns involved.

We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.

Petition to the DNC

Contact:

legionof7@riseup.net

/u/Legionof7 on Reddit

References

1. “Democrats Are Playing a Dangerous Game With the Debate Schedule” Time. 16 Sept 2015. http://time.com/4036206/democrats-are-playing-a-dangerous-game-with-the-debate-schedule/

2. “Martin O’Malley Accuses D.N.C. of Favoring Hillary Clinton” New York Times FirstDraft. 5 Aug 2015.

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/08/05/martin-omalley-accuses-d-n-c-of-favoring-hillary-clinton/

3. “DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz Erroneously Rules Motion for More Debates Out of Order” Reddit. 29 Aug 2015.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/3iuw8z/update_dnc_chair_debbie_wasserman_schultz/

4. “DNC Chair Gets Heckled By Protesters Calling for More Democratic Debates” ABC News. 19 Sept 2015. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/dnc-chair-heckled-protesters-calling-democratic-debates/story?id=33880805

5. Wolf Blitzer Interviews Debbie Wasserman Schultz CNN. 17 Dec 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6Rk-jmgMyA

6. “From the horse’s mouth: the NGP VAN statement on the data breach” Democratic Underground. 22 Dec 2015. http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251938502

7. “The Sanders campaign is taking its fight with the DNC to the next level” Yahoo! Politics. 25 Dec 2015. https://www.yahoo.com/politics/the-sanders-campaign-is-taking-their-fight-with-200738611.html

8. “Data Security and Privacy” NGP VAN. 18 Dec 2015. http://blog.ngpvan.com/news/data-security-and-privacy

9. “Fired Sanders aide: I wasn’t peeking at Clinton data files” CNN. 18 Dec 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/18/politics/sanders-dnc-data-breach-josh-uretsky/

10. “Sanders staffer fired after alleged Hillary data breach” New York Post. 18 Dec 2015.

http://nypost.com/2015/12/18/sanders-staffer-fired-after-alleged-hillary-data-breach/

11. “DNC penalizes Sanders campaign for improper access of Clinton voter data” The Washington Post. 18 Dec 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/dnc-sanders-campaign-improperly-accessed-clinton-voter-data/2015/12/17/a2e2e14e-a522-11e5-b53d-972e2751f433_story.html

12. “Sanders campaign sues DNC after database breach” CNN. 21 Dec 2015.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/18/politics/bernie-sanders-campaign-dnc-suspension/index.html

13. “DNC Restores Sanders Campaign’s Access To Voter Files After Data Breach” NPR. 19 Dec 2015. http://www.npr.org/2015/12/19/460361192/dnc-restores-sanders-campaigns-access-to-voter-files-after-data-breach

14. “Good for Bernie. The DNC is nothing more than an arm for the Clinton campaign.” Twitter @JimWebbUSA. 18 Dec 15. https://mobile.twitter.com/jimwebbusa/status/677928400787546112

15. “Chaos in the Democratic presidential primary” Politico. 19 Dec 2015. http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/sanders-campaign-threatens-to-sue-dnc-216942

16. “Curious Choice of Auditor for Democratic Database Flap” Courthouse News Service. 23 Dec 2015.

http://www.courthousenews.com/2015/12/23/curious-choice-of-auditor-for-democratic-database-flap.htm

17. “The Secret Keeper: Jules Kroll and the world of corporate intelligence” The New Yorker. 19 Oct 2009.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/19/the-secret-keeper

18. “A Spy in the Jungle” The Atlantic. 2 Aug 2010.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/08/a-spy-in-the-jungle/60770/

19. “UT admissions scandal is 10 times bigger than official report” Watchdog.org Texas Bureau. 14 Jul 2015.

http://watchdog.org/228880/kroll-powers-breathtaking/

Biographies

Debbie Wasserman Schultz — Chair of the Democratic National Committee and Campaign Manager for Hillary Clinton in 2008

Emanuele Conti — CEO of Kroll

Stu Trevelyan — CEO of NGP VAN, worked in the Clinton/Gore campaign in 1992

Hillary Rodham Clinton — Democratic candidate for the 2016 election and previous Democratic candidate in 2008

Josh Uretsky — Formerly the National Data Director for the Sanders campaign who accessed Clinton data and was later fired

Nathaniel Pearlman — Founder of NGP and Chief Technology Officer for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign.