Democrats rethink huge, vulnerable databases of voter information

According to multiple people, the Democratic Central Nervous System was incredibly worried last summer, so they put in extraordinary interventions to do amazing interventions last summer.

If that breaks down, the entire party’s eviction operation will be temporarily crippled, forcing Canbuster to manipulate pen and paper instead of smartphones, effectively blinding the campaign.

To avoid such a catastrophe, people said, the Democratic National Committee and a small number of engineers from the Kamala Harris campaign have been washed away and will ensure that the database will be floating over months.

Private companies running the database have warned several Democrat groups that they cannot process the large amount of data being uploaded and downloaded. External entities compete to set up workarounds, and wealthy Democratic financier Allen Blue was asked to fund emergency engineering projects to keep the data flowing.

“This cannot happen again,” said Blue, founder of LinkedIn. He warned that overhauling the party’s technological infrastructure should be part of a broader democratic reconstruction effort. “Technology and data are the foundation of how modern campaigns run.”

This previously unreported episode deepened concern at the party’s highest level regarding the singular dependence on commercial companies that the majority owners, private equity firms, have in recent years imposed layoffs to cut costs.

The company claims the database was working fine.

This week, a group of Democrat tech operatives gathered in Puerto Rico to discuss the future of the party’s data and technology, with the fate of a database system called NGP Van on the agenda.

Also on Wednesday, a group called The Movement Cooperative, a nonprofit that provides data and technology support to progressive groups, called for proposals on building a new voter data system that is being discussed as an alternative to NGP Van.

Michael Fisher, who joined the Harris campaign last summer to ensure the reliability of its technology, said the database had wheezing for years and required a huge amount of distracting attention to function in 2024.

“This won’t be a conversation in another four years,” Fisher said, urging Democrats to set up a new database. “The only reason I’m talking to you is that this is a moment of change.”

Right now, the Democratic National Committee is considering exactly that. Officials are pondering things like nuclear options. According to two people with knowledge of conversations claiming anonymity to call clauses buried in a contract with the database owner and request a copy of the source code.

The committee refused to answer questions about the plan.

“The Democrats’ technology infrastructure ensures they are ready to win elections both in the coming votes and in the next few years. This includes important safeguards and redundancy so that data is safe and accessible and that Democrats don’t get caught up in.” “We evaluate all our relationships with vendors to make sure they all meet at the moment.”

Thompson was one of the party’s high-tech operatives meetings in Puerto Rico.

Chelsea Peterson Thompson, general manager of NGP Van, has no connection to Thompson, but he emphasized the product description, describing it in a statement as “the gold standard for political organizational tools.”

She proposed an impure motive for criticism.

“It is neither surprising nor new that space detractors want the opposite to benefit their personal or commercial ambitions.

And she denied that the platform had failed — “we weren’t approaching at all,” she said — and said the final weeks of the election were “very calm.”

Tracing its origins until the late 1990s, the company is called NGP Van after a 2010 merger specializing in political funding, NGP software, and voter activation networks focusing on voter contact.

Van, as most Democrats, contains billions of records, equivalent to almost all the information the party has collected about tens of millions of Americans. Virtually every democratically arranged campaign or group can access those records and make the information work to persuade, organize and mobilize voters.

As the proverb is also among party operatives, “If it’s not in the van, it doesn’t exist.”

NGP Van was purchased in 2021 by private equity company Apax Partners as part of a $2 billion deal. This created a subsidiary called Bonterra, which currently oversees the company.

(The Republicans also rely on Data Trust, a for-profit company to accommodate voter files. However, data trusts have remained under the control of operatives that have lined up with their parties since they were founded almost 15 years ago.)

Democrat officials complained publicly And personally about the detrimental effects of cost reductions, layoffs and lack of investment since purchasing. An Internal Democratic National Committee memo obtained by the New York Times in early 2023 warned that Van’s infrastructure was “inflexible, slow and unreliable, especially during peak usage.”

“Bontera could continue to cut costs and move development resources from the core tools used in democratic campaigns,” the memo predicted.

In early 2024, concerns were so severe that the DNC held internal discussions on the exercise of source code clauses. The committee drafted a letter from executive director Sam Cornelle to the Chief Executive Officer of Bonterra. This cited concerns about the stability of the database and the support they received from the company. The draft said the DNC would need a code that “helps protect Democrats’ interests against potential risks during this period of uncertainty.”

The letter was never sent. Party officials and Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s reelection campaign – there was no Chief Technology Officer of its own, but ultimately decided that such a dramatic move could backfire mid-year.

They decided to take the chance to stick to the NGP van.

Still, after the 2020 Biden campaign was sometimes a problem, a group of Democrats worried about the reliability of the system, have built a backup plan through an entity called the Movement Infrastructure Group. We effectively created side doors to allow large amounts of data to enter and exit the NGP van system.

The terror of the NGP Van System meltdown grew last summer after Harris became the Democratic candidate for the president.

From that point onwards to the election, people said the Harris Campaign and DNC had technical experts who worked full-time to keep the NGP Van’s tools working.

Still, in October, Mike Pfohl, president of Empower Project, a progressive nonprofit organising the work, said he was “shocked” from NGP Van to cut down on the information the group was adding and extracting from the database.

“We were told we were generating too much traffic to them and we had to throttle the amount of data we were sending, so no one else crashed,” Pfohl said.

Thompson, general manager of NGP Van, said only a few software vendors who were planning to rate limit “thousands of requests per second” in the database were affected. She said NGP van worked with those groups to address their needs.

Pfohl said his organization could manage but throttling could have been devastating for others. He then spoke lightly about NGP Van’s private equity ownership, saying that profit motives are at odds with the reasons for the database’s existence in the first place.

“The mission should be a mission,” he said. “The idea that we will take dues from our members to help someone ultimately buy a yacht boils my blood.”