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Comment by lintiness | Hacker News Reader

"if someone wins a popular vote by 2 million fucking votes, then they should probably win the election."

what if she spent TWICE the money getting them?

Why is the amount of money spent relevant? At the end of the day, more individuals felt that Clinton should be their president.

uh, dunno ... maybe yield on dollars spent is indicative of, say, their ability to manage our tax dollars.

No? I don't see how spending money on a campaign is related to spending money on, say, social security. Otherwise, you're suggesting that advertising companies would be fantastic at government. Like, "They got me to buy Coke, they must be great at managing our public education!"

i didn't qualify their "ability" to govern; i suggested a poor use of money spent campaigning MIGHT be indicative of one's poor use of money governing. do you have a logical counter, or are you and everybody else around still crying over the hillary loss?

My logical counter was that use of money spent campaigning has almost nothing to do with one's use of money governing. One is related to your ability to motivate a voter base, and the other is about policy-making and apportioning funds for public services. Completely unrelated.

You're ignoring the Citizens United decision, we don't have real figures on campaign spending with superpacs and third party campaign vehicles. Additionally no one is taking into account the resources the Russian government poured into the Trump campaign, their state news channel was repeating the republican/trump message ad verbatim. [1]

[1] http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/underst...

That's a separate issue. Not saying it's right or wrong, but at the end of the day, she had more votes.

She got more votes in a system where opponent did not optimize his process for more votes, therefore it is a meaningless metric.

Indeed, but if it were based on raw votes then we'd probably not have had Mrs Clinton vs Mr Trump in 2016 because the timeline would have branched in 2000 based on the same metric.

It's an interesting example of arguing against a cause that's only relevant because of the effect it caused previously.

Legal votes? Not likely and also not likely she got the plural vote. Yes, even if 100% of the difference were legal (they aren't) it's not a majority, it's a plurality.

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