Last Wednesday morning around 10:40 AM, NGP VAN, the company whose software hosts the Democratic National Committee’s voter file, released a routine software update. The update introduced a bug that allowed members of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, among others, to filter the voter records they share using “scores” they do not share (about which more shortly).

For the next hour or so, members of Sanders’ staff ran twenty-five searches using scores generated by the Clinton campaign; their intentions in doing so are now the subject of heated dispute. By noon, NGP VAN staff were aware of the issue and had taken steps to fix it.

By Friday, the DNC — which brokers access to VAN/VoteBuilder and mediates disputes between its users — went public with the story and ordered NGP VAN to deny the Sanders campaign access. Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook accused the Sanders campaign of deliberately stealing data to gain a competitive edge. The Sanders campaign fired its data director, Josh Uretsky, and Uretsky, taking full responsibility for the actions of his subordinates, insisted they had only intended to document the problem. Hoping for an injunction to regain access, the Sanders camp sued the DNC in federal court.