Dems Had A Secret Twitter Account For Skirting Election Laws Too

It turns out Republicans weren’t the only ones using Twitter to get around federal campaign laws.

Less than a week after CNN’s Chris Moody broke the news that Republicans were using secret but in-plain-sight public Twitter accounts to pass along internal polling data on House campaigns between outside groups and GOP committees, The Huffington Post reported that in 2012 the Democratic Party passed along information on advertising buys through a Twitter account with the handle @AdBuysDetails.

The account, according to The Huffington Post report, posted tweets between late August and late October on ad buys between Democratic candidates running for the House of Representatives across the country and super PACs and outside groups.

The AdBuyDetails account was meant to get around restrictions on information sharing by being a publicly available twitter account. But like the GOP accounts, the AdBuyDetails tweets were only really useful for people who could decipher what the tweets meant. Here’s a sample tweet: “Bill Enyart for Congress/DCCC”,IL-12 GEN,10/23,10/29,broadcast,281,A35+,30,KTVI,23800,101.9.”

There’s one glaring difference between the GOP’s twitter accounts and the Democratic one: the way to decode the tweets are available in the bio for @adbuydetails.

“Buyer,Race,Start date,End date,[broadcast | cable | radio],marketcode(see table: http://goo.gl/txRY8),Target group,Spot length,Station,Dollars,TRPs#buydetails,” the bio read.

“The purpose was to aggregate publicly available TV buy information,” DCCC press secretary Josh Schwerin told TPM.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee communications director Emily Bittner noted that the AdBuyDetails account had been dormant for years.

“This account has been dormant for two years. As you can see from the account, the information is publicly available facts about TV buys and allows any member of the public to read and understand it,” Bittner told The Huffington Post.

As TPM previously reported, campaign law is kind of murky in situations like these twitter accounts and so lacking very undeniable proof of direct coordination, it’s unlikely there will be any legal repercussions related to the twitter accounts.

Here’s a screenshot of the Twitter account below:

This post has been updated.