Most El Paso Democratic Party candidates use NGP VAN, a Democratic Party voter outreach platform for running campaigns. What many candidates may not know is that the NGP VAN platform provides unprecedented access to certain individuals – like Michael Apodaca – that can provide an advantage to one campaign over another our analysis of the runoff between Josh Acevedo and Verónica Carbajal revealed.
NGP VAN is a Democratic Party digital platform used by Democrats to organize and track voters through Election Day. In short, the NGP VAN is a robust database of voter profiles used exclusively by Democratic candidates. Although closely tied to the Democratic Party, who controls who has access to the “Democratic Party’s most sensitive data,” is a private company not owned by the Democratic Party. NGP VAN is owned by a British private equity firm. Bonterra, the merged company that owns NGP VAN, announced on January 12 that it would begin laying off 10% of its workforce. Nonetheless, NGP VAN continues to be the go-to digital platform for most political Democratic Party candidates running for office. NGP VAN remains a monopoly for Democratic Party candidates, labor unions and nonprofits today.
The What
Even though NGP VAN is used by progressive organizations for organizing voter outreach, it is notorious for being opaque about how it manages the data that it warehouses nationally. Publicly, NGP VAN says that the data each campaign collects and manages is limited to that campaign and aggregate data is added to the database only to strengthen its data for all users. Because Democratic campaigns faceoff in primaries, it is important that they believe that the voter outreach data they manage for their campaigns does not unfairly help their opponents. The campaigns must accept that their data is safe from their competitors.
In December 2015, the Bernie Sanders Campaign was temporarily suspended from NGP VAN after his campaign was accused of viewing Hillary Clinton’s confidential NGP VAN campaign information. NGP VAN keeps a centralized database of voter profiles which is available to all campaigns using the system. Individual campaigns can then add their own data, like voter contact details, to the master list. It is the added data that is supposed to be limited only to that campaign. When an opponent accesses confidential information, it provides them a window into the strategies of the campaign and how effective their voter outreach is.
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It is important to note that it was the Sanders Campaign that reported to NGP VAN that a bug allowed the campaign to see Hillary Clinton’s confidential voter data. Had the Sanders Campaign not reported the issue, it is unknown how long or if the data leak would have been detected by NGP VAN.
Nonetheless, the seriousness of the data breach was such that the Sanders Campaign was suspended from using NGP VAN by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) “until his campaign officials can ‘prove’ they’ve deleted the Clinton data.”
Because the NGP VAN is so important to the success of Democratic campaigns, it forced Bernie Sanders to file a lawsuit (the lawsuit filing is available below) in federal court to have his access restored. Sanders’ access was restored after an “agreement” was reached between the DNC and the Sanders Campaign. However both sides had different explanations as to what the “agreement” was with neither clearly explaining the “agreement” and both proclaiming victory.
The When
On December 9, 2023, Josh Acevedo and Verónica Carbajal emerged as the frontrunners to assume Alexsandra Annello’s vacated City Council District 2 seat. Acevedo and Carbajal faced off in a run of election on January 20 where Acevedo defeated Carbajal by 307 votes.
El Paso News has been reviewing the updates made to NGP VAN voter profiles from October through this year. The activity shows that about 600 updates were made to voter profiles in El Paso by about 20 campaigns and individuals. A little over 50% of the activity we reviewed occurred after the December 9 election. About 42% of that activity occurred between December 9 and January 20, the day of the runoff election between Acevedo and Carbajal.
The voter profile updates we reviewed are known by NGP VAN as “suppressions.” Although “suppressions,” in the context of voting, is often characterized as suppressing voters for a specific candidate, in this case that is not what the term means.
In political organizing and in NGP VAN, the term “suppressions” is used to describe a voter profile that is suppressed by a campaign from their voter lists. The reasons vary among campaigns but generally they are about campaign resources. For example, if a campaign knows that a trusted partner is sending mailers to potential voters then it is prudent for the campaign to exclude, or “suppress” those voters from their own mailings to maximize the campaign’s resources.
Normally, it is the campaign that determines which voter profiles it wants to suppress from its own lists.
The NGP VAN activity – in itself – is unimportant and should have no effect on any election. In many ways, it is the result of the various campaigns working to target voters to their candidates. Much of the activity is unlikely to have had any effect on the runoff between Acevedo and Carbajal. However, how NGP VAN handles voter profile updates, or “suppressions” is what has led to questions about Apodaca’s activity during the Acevedo-Carbajal runoff election.
The Who
Michael Apodaca was elected the Democratic Party Chairman in 2022. Apodaca is the sole contender for the chairmanship in the 2024 ballot. In 2013 he ran for the District 2 city council seat after Susie Byrd termed out. Apodaca ended in fourth place in a field of nine candidates with 14.28% of the vote. In 2021, Veronica Escobar named Apodaca as her Deputy Campaign Manager and Field Director. In making the announcement on Facebook on June 8, 2021, Escobar wrote that Apodaca’s “expertise in El Paso voter data and outreach is unmatched.”
As the Democratic Party Chairman, Apodaca’s primary role is to support El Paso’s Democratic Party candidates running for office. In the Primaries it is his role, as party chair, to ensure that all the Democratic Party candidates have the support they need without picking one candidate over another Democrat.
What the data suggests is that Apodaca seems to have taken an active role in the Acevedo/Carbajal runoff election which would make him partial to one Democrat over another. Although Apodaca is free to support a candidate privately, publicly endorsing one, or, worse using Party resources like NGP VAN to support one Democrat over another would be wrong and party members would likely object.
The How
When data is updated by anyone on the NGP VAN platform that voter-profile is coded with a suppression code and a suppression name. Coded as suppressed, campaigns that are unaware of the suppression would not know that a voter profile is not available on their target lists. Including suppressions in NGP VAN lists is not the default selection and must be manually selected “each time a list is generated” by a campaign according to a 2009 Data Barack Obama paper that investigated the use of data in political campaigning.
The requirement to manually know and to manually check a “box that is often hidden from immediate view” adds complexity to the process and is often unknown to campaigns. It is here where “suppressions” can have unintended consequences to campaigns and may even be used to provide an advantage to another campaign by individuals who have greater access than the campaigns do.
This is where our analysis led us to question the updates to the voter profiles made by Michael Apodaca.
Of the close to 70 suppressions that Michael Apodaca made from October to recently, 62% were made during the period when both the Acevedo and Carbajal campaigns were actively organizing their voter outreach for the election.
What is notable about Apodaca’s activity during this crucial time for both candidates is not only the timing of it but the targeted activity that Apodaca took. Apodaca’s activities were clustered around voters in District 2 where almost 80% of his suppressions occurring in District 2.
Compared to the other campaigns, Apodaca’s activities were uncharacteristic of what one would expect from the normal use of the suppression tools in NGP VAN. The other campaigns’ activities were on voter profiles across the county as expected when the suppression tool is used normally to update bad addresses, telephone numbers or other voter profile data.
As the county-wide representative of El Paso’s Democrats, Apodaca’s activities should represent work on voter profiles across the county.
They do not.
Before asking the important questions as to why Michael Apodaca was so focused on District 2 it is important to briefly touch on one aspect of NGP VAN that few have noted – the monopoly of the Democrats’ important data across the nation.
The Monopoly
The 2015 Bernie Sanders/DNC NGP VAN controversy highlights a fundamental issue with NGP VAN. NGP VAN, which maintains an unprecedented data set of voters across America is owned by a foreign company. The Democratic National Committee limits the use NGP VAN to Democratic candidates. Because the DNC controls access to a central database of America’s voters it holds a monopoly over who can use the data. As a monopoly it can be exploited.
In addition to inappropriately sharing campaign data across campaigns, there remains a fundamental problem with NGP VAN. It is inherently a single point of failure. A single point of failure in any system is where one item fails – no matter how many backup systems exist – it leads to the complete failure of the system.
Take for example, your television set. Someone who does not want their television set to fail during the Super Bowl may attach a generator to it to ensure against a power outage and add cable, an antenna and a connection to the internet to safeguard against a loss of connectivity. However, there remains a single point of failure in the television – the power cord connected to it. If the power cord, which is fixed to the television set develops a short, the back up systems would not mitigate the loss of power to the television set and the Super Bowl would not play on the television set.
Likewise, NGP VAN, in addition to problems with inappropriate access to voter data and data breaches has a fundamental single point of failure within its system. Democratic Party candidates have become so dependent on the data provided to their campaigns that should NGP VAN cease to function there is little a campaign can do to recover their data and use it for their campaigns, especially days away from an important election. As Sanders’ lawsuit noted, “the loss of access to the Voter Data (in NGP VAN) could significantly disadvantage, if not cripple, a Democratic candidate’s campaign for public office.”
Because NGP VAN is opaque about its operations, the breaches of data and inappropriate use of the system only comes to light when information is leaked or a campaign, like Bernie Sanders, reports a problem. What inappropriate uses of the system or data breaches have occurred may not even be known to NGP VAN further raising questions of data security for Democratic Party candidates.
The “DNC has an incentive to perpetuate the monopoly” because “much of their power derives from being able to dictate data access,” was demonstrated in 2015 by the Bernie Sanders incident.
Although other software can be used by campaigns, the “underlining data” controlled by the DNC is what is important and the DNC “has decreed” that all access to the central database must flow through NGP VAN.
Even when a data issue is brought to the attention of NGP VAN officials, the DNC unilaterally sanctions campaigns along political bias. In 2008, a “security incident arose with the NGP VAN software” (Sanders’ lawsuit) which resulted in Hillary Clinton’s Campaign receiving confidential information. Unlike the DNC’s suspension of Bernie Sanders’ access to NGP VAN, there is no known suspension of Clinton’s access in 2008.
In addition to the apparent unequal treatment of users of the NGP VAN platform, the agreement campaigns must sign to use the software limits what data access it provides them while giving NGP VAN the right “to use all voter data collected by the Campaign.” (Sanders’ lawsuit)
What It Suggests
We asked Michael Apodaca why he was focused on updating District 2 voters during the runoff election. Apodaca was adding the four-digit zip code numbers to the voters he updated. Because Apodaca refused to comment we are left attempting to understand what his motivations may have been.
The first obvious reason for working on District 2 data was because of the runoff election. Was Apodaca’s activity because he was supporting Josh Acevedo over Verónica Carbajal? We have been told by several sources that it was common knowledge that Apodaca supported Acevedo.
If Apodaca was simply cleaning up bad data, then why would he be doing so in a city council race that would be ending soon? The Primaries are only a few weeks away meaning that Apodaca’s time would be better spent on activities that would benefit the candidates running on the Democratic ticket instead of the two candidates facing off in a runoff with few active voters in a non-partisan election.
Unfortunately, our analysis revealed an even more serious problem with NGP VAN. How the system parcels access to different sources of data within the platform is not only opaque but it gives certain individuals – often unknown to the candidates – access to data that can provide favored candidates an unprecedented advantage in an election simply by viewing activity most candidates are not aware of.
Candidates cannot know if Michael Apodaca was/is acting for the benefit of the El Paso Democratic Party because he refused to explain why the data we uncovered suggests what it does. In addition to the monopoly over data that NGP VAN imposes, its opaqueness on who and when certain individuals have access to sensitive data, not to mention the fact that today’s disclosure of Apodaca’s activities on the platform is one small sample showing serious problems for the campaigns that use the platform. How many more activities happening behind walled off sections of NGP VAN are candidates not aware of? Therein lies the fundamental problem for users of NGP VAN.
Verónica Carbajal Responds
We asked Verónica Carbajal for a comment about our findings. In an email today, she wrote that “it is too early for me to comment on what, if anything, was done improperly in the District 2 race.” Carbajal added that “however, I do want us to ensure that both candidates were playing from the same deck of cards and under the same rules.” Carbajal closed with “if we weren’t, then this matter must be looked at more closely” because “voters, candidates, and their supporters deserve transparent and fair elections.”
Should Michael Apodaca respond to our request for comment in the future we will update this article.
Disclosure
Each election cycle, El Paso News publishes the names of the political candidates that the technology company owned by Martín Paredes provides branding and technology services to. Although not required to, we provide this list to our readers for transparency purposes. Clients of Cognent have no influence over the stories we choose to cover. Click here for more details.
It reads as if you are trying to make something out of nothing. Is it because your favorite candidate lost? Is that it? Your own words were that it did not affect the election. As I read the article it reads as if you want to make an accusation but know said statement would be false. So where is the beef Martin. My god with the mess at city hall and the county it would seem they would occupy your time.
Good reporting, Martin. I can’t imagine that any local media is capable of this kind of analysis. I hope this does not taint the election results as there were two fine young candidates involved and there should be no doubt who won and why.