This is the link from British Expats: Say Yes 2 Europe - Remain In the EU
This gives the whole of the expert evidence .
I think you can’t really know. Even given the claim that “the campaign’s digital strategy … reached “tens of millions of people” in its last crucial days, after its spending limit had been breached – enough to change the outcome” you don’t know that, had it budgeted within the limits, it would not have kept some cash in hand for a “final push” before the vote.
So, I am not actually convinced that the extra cash was solely responsible for Leave winning; it was more complex than that. A lacklustre Remain campaign, the odds stacked by years of mis-reporting the effect and intent of EU legislation and a mendacious Leave campaign all played their part.
Why should there be different rules for a Referendum and a General or By Election?
If these people have broken electoral law the Referendum should be declared void.
There shouldn’t be.
It wouldn’t make any difference at this stage. The referendum was advisory, Parliament had the sovereign power to invoke A50 - the one did not stem from the other so there is no legal grounds for withdrawing our notification of leaving the EU even if the referendum result were nullified.
All you can say is that it was “tainted advice”.
Thanks to Cameron’s mis-playing of the thing though, it became politically binding, whether or not Leave played fair…
Surely it would be a flawed assumption to believe that just because an advert “reached” someone, that said person actually read it. Personally I am “reached” by all sorts of advertising material (both digital and otherwise) every day and the vast majority goes straight into the trash can unread.
Based on personal experience, I would estimate that 75% of said advertising is trashed unread. In any election or referendum the voting intent of most of the electorate is pre-ordained by past life experience, so I think that in reality the numbers of people who may have had their voting intention swayed by last minute campaigning (legal or not) would probably be very small.
Additionally, is it really likely that those who made a last minute decision on which way to vote, actually did so on the basis of the content of a digital advertisement ? Seems to me that such an assumption is either rather big-headed on the part of the advertising industry people or an insult to the intelligence of voters.
Anyway, isn’t this all a bit ‘old news’ ? I mean it’s not as if it was the referendum itself that activated Article 50. That was a political decision taken by a government willing to do virtually anything to stay in power ---- just like the decision to hold a referendum in the first place.