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Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

>received $100K from the Buttigieg campaign

This company produces the textbanking software that the Buttigieg campaign uses. It's frustrating to watch people repeating the phrase "received money from the Buttigieg campaign" with the implication that it's a bribe when the actual situation is that both the Iowa Democratic Party and the Buttigieg campaign used the same contractor for some software.

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There's a pretty clear conflict of interest between the Buttigieg work of helping his campaign and the caucus tabulating work for the DNC. There might not be actual foul play, but the reason we look to avoid conflicts of interest in things like this is that it's easier to establish a lack of conflict of interest than it is to establish a lack of foul play.

Most people working in politics have done work for a zillion other candidates and the state/national party apparatus before. That’s the nature of political work; campaigns only last a few months so people are always job hopping. If that counts as a conflict of interest than every staffer for every single candidate is guilty of a conflict of interest.

You're supporting my point. If a staffer worked for a campaign and in a role in charge of election integrity at the same time, as this firm is doing, it would indeed be considered a conflict of interest.

I think the parent's point is that if you only consider contractors/staffers who don't have conflicts of interest of this sort, your hiring pool drops to a number that is too small to be useful.

Whether or not that's true is debatable, but I think it's a compelling point.

>your hiring pool drops to a number that is too small to be useful.

That's why it's called a swamp.

Nobody creates a ledger in their accounting books called "money from bribes". At the very least, you can argue there is a conflict of interest.

lol that totally clears potential corruption

Yeah, I guess Republicans can never use Drupal, because a lot of Democratic money went towards it. Can anyone use Windows anymore? Certainly no cloud service can ever be used.

Democrat money went to Drupal? Can you please describe further? (Just curious, it sounds like a good story.)

I'm trying to find sources on it (gave up but it's out there somewhere), but as I remember the Obama campaign / digital team used a lot of Drupal and contributed to the project as well. Then after Obama became President his administration pushed Drupal pretty hard. In addition people from the administration went on to work/lobby for Acquia.

pretty sure you're right but also pretty sure people with a sound ethical worldview wouldn't be simultaneously engaged in text banking and vote counting...but then these are the people who also thought it would be funny to name their company "Shadow." The only thing more laughable is that no one in the state of Iowa apparently had a reason for concern prior to last night.

Biden and Gillibrand use them for similar services but paid far less than Buttigieg.

I would want to see how much other campaigns paid for textbanking software but that seems unusually expensive.

100k is a lot more for that software compared to what Biden paid.

Do you have a source?

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