Senator Clinton has begun claiming a lead in the popular vote as the nominating contest winds down. This requires some thought. Here's what she's saying:

“I think it will be most likely the case in a few days,” Mrs. Clinton said from San Juan. “I will have won the most votes — more than anyone in the history of the primary process.”

She added: “Senator Obama has a narrow lead in delegates. And we’re going to have to make our case to the automatic so-called superdelegates. And I think my case is clear — more than 17 million people voted for me.

“In recent primary history, we have never nominated someone who has not won the popular vote.”

The popular vote in the Democratic primary is as meaningless as it is in the Presidential election itself. It does not determine the nominee; delegates do that. However, the appeal to majoritarian support is a powerful moral argument, which is presumably why Clinton is making it, and why it's doubly shameful that her claim is false, rests on disenfranchisement, and sacrifices commonly held agreed standards of veracity in favor of a nakedly self-interested argument.

Clinton's so-called lead in the popular vote - Real Clear Politics tabulates the numbers here - rests on two related assumptions: that voters in Michigan, where Obama was not on the ballot, along with John Edwards and some others, wanted to vote for "uncommitted" as opposed to Obama or Edwards; and that voters in caucus states - Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington - where no voter totals were kept, do not exist.

In short, Clinton's moral argument relies on the selective disenfranchisement of Obama voters in five states. One can make a supporting argument that the total of Obama's support in Michigan is unknowable - but it defies credulity, good sense and simple logic to claim that the Illinois Senator's support in Michigan is zero, as it would have to be for Clinton's claim to be true. We know that the support is there, what's at issue is the question of how to measure it, given that voters were denied the chance to express themselves.

The same problem of unknowability affects the four caucus states, since they do not keep tallies of voters. We do have relatively reliable numbers for turnout, however, and we can make informed judgments as to how many voters, roughly, were supporting which candidate. We don't really need those tallies in a delegate contest, mind you, but let's follow Senator Clinton's logic to its conclusion. That logic is simple: for her to have that popular vote lead in advance of the last two primaries, Obama's support in the four caucus states also needs to be zero. Given that he won three of the four, that's a logical absurdity. For this moral argument to be true, you have to assume that the technical issue of a lack of certification of voter numbers amounts to a moral judgment that these votes should not be counted.

By the fullest measure of votes - which, if your argument rests on counting all the votes to best ascertain the popular will, is the proper yardstick - 17,961,368 voters chose Barack Obama, and 17,916,763 chose Hillary Clinton. Now, you can quibble about those totals, since Obama's number, which allocates the uncommitted votes of Michigan fully to his column, presumably also contains some Michigan voters who wanted to, but could not, vote for other candidates not on the ballot. But at a bare minimum, these numbers allow for one observation that can't be contested: more people voted for someone other than Hillary Clinton than voted for her, and someone other leaves, today, only Barack Obama.

In short, Hillary's popular vote argument is a fraud. She does not have the support of a majority of voters. To claim otherwise is insulting to the electorate and abusive of the intelligence of American voters.