I was very upset on returning home from work to find news of the Democratic National Committee’s decision to cut off the Sanders campaign’s access to its voter data. After signing a few petitions and contacting my Democratic representative, I continued researching the reports to get more details and ran across an article explaining what happened from the point of view of the campaign operative who was fired.

I listened to Debbie Wasserman Shultz’s version of events (likening it to a person walking into someone’s home because the door wasn’t locked and taking things). But that doesn’t sound like what he was doing to me. It sounds more like he was trying to understand what was going on. In these situations (data breaches and reports of suspicious activity), a certain amount of research is required to assess the scope of the problem. As a programmer myself, I often am called upon to investigate unexpected behavior of our data.

From Josh Uretzky’s statement, I infer that he was just a pawn in this chess game; I would love to hear another computer professional’s opinion about his actions. I understand why the Sanders campaign felt they had to fire him, but he may have been just an innocent victim of circumstances here.

Ironically, this is exactly the kind of dirty tricks Bernie’s campaign is trying to fight. It’s one of the reasons I support him. I hope over time that an independent investigation of the way the Democratic National Committee is managing this data will shed more light on what actually happened, even if we never know precisely why it happened.

Don Smallidge

Waterville