Speaking of Adam Smith’s “conspiracy against the public… “* Jon Ward, at Yahoo News, “RNC’s deal with Koch political operation raises questions about illegal coordination“:
The most important thing that Republicans did over the past two years to improve their data and technology came at the end of August.
That’s when Data Trust, the private company that functions as an offshoot of the Republican National Committee, announced that it would begin sharing information from its voter file with i360, the entity created by the Koch brothers to house its own voter file and data analytics tools.
For the first time ever, the two biggest voter-file-gathering operations on the right would be working together. They would remain independent of each other, but benefit from the information-gathering work of each other’s volunteers. The data flows would go both ways, and the RNC would for the first time have access to the outside groups’ data…
The sharing agreement between the RNC and the Kochs was not easy to arrange. The RNC had legal questions about whether a party committee and an outside group could share voter data without violating federal law. Democrats, in fact, still accuse them of violating the law and have filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission.
The suit argues that the RNC and the Kochs “appear to be illegally coordinating through the ongoing exchange of non-public strategic campaign and party data, resulting in millions of dollars in prohibited contributions from Super PACs and corporations to Republican campaigns and parties.”
Getting the two sides to cooperate was also an obstacle, insiders told Yahoo News. One source at a party committee referred to it as a “power struggle” between the two groups over who would control data collected by volunteers and paid staff on the ground…
While relations between the RNC and the Koch empire have outwardly improved, theirs remains an uneasy truce. The data-sharing agreement gives the central party a boost, allowing it to make up data-gathering ground it had lost to outside groups, but it also strengthens the Koch empire by giving its analytics firm an array of information the Republican Party has gathered on voters. What the Koch groups do with that data going forward is not something the RNC has any control over, and vice versa…
* “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public…” — The Wealth of Nations
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