U.S. Presidential debate

[kandrathe]

But Hillary didn't need either. She won convincingly enough to make it a non-issue. It wasn't close. It wasn't close even if you don't count the superdelegates at all. She won by 3.5 million votes, by almost 12%. I'm not an American, so I don't get to vote in US primaries, and if I did, I would have voted for Bernie. But he lost, and no amount of chipping at the edges changes that.

But... Overall vote count is meaningless in choosing delegates to the convention.

"...the joint fundraising structure allows Clinton to accept much larger individual donations than her campaign is legally allowed to receive, and that money is then being used to send out mailers and online ads to raise money from smaller donors who can contribute directly to the campaign multiple times." -- Bernie Sanders

The DNC and Clinton did many shady things to rig counties, and state outcomes in her favor. Including unfairly funding Clinton, and withholding money from Bernie's campaign, and hurting his ability to organize with the greater democratic party. It's not the final SUM, it's all the process of the 50+ partial sums, that made the final SUM inevitable.

Even looking at the final 3.5 million, it is only about 14% -- could the DNC lean on the scales by 14%? Yes, I think so. especially in the big closed state primaries (organized by the democratic party. e.g. NY, FL, TX, PA) where only registered democrats were able to vote.

Ergo, probably a good case for it being rigged.

“This is the type of mega, mega joint fundraising committee that we all feared would come into existence if McCutcheon were ruled the wrong way, which it was,” said Craig Holman with Public Citizen. “It makes maximum use of the loose rules governing joint fundraising. They’re using big checks to set up a small donor fundraising campaign and turning over the small donors to the Hillary campaign while keeping the large ones for the party. It is permissible, but it’s offensive, and it should be illegal.”

Both Holman and Larry Noble with the Campaign Legal Center emphasized that it’s extremely unusual and possibly unprecedented for a party to raise so much money for a candidate before the general election.

“It shows the DNC has clearly taken sides before they even have a nominee,” said Holman. “There’s an obvious bias.”

The Clinton camp argued that the same slimey mechanism was available to Sanders. I count it as a positive that he rebuffed it. If you are against Citizens United and McCutcheon, then it would be the height of hypocrisy to utilize them in campaign financing (like Wellstones weak attempt to not take any PAC money).

There’s no question that we need to make Washington work much better than it does today. And that means, in particular, getting unaccountable money out of our politics. … That’s why I’m so passionate about this issue, and I will fight hard to end the stranglehold that the wealthy and special interests have on so much of our government. Hillary, June 22, 2016

LOL. Ya, right.

Hillary -- https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candi...=N00000019

Bernie -- https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candi...=N00000528