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Comment by tedunangst | Hacker News Reader

Does this logic not work in reverse? Only a quarter of the population voted to stay.

Sure, but it's not uncommon to set higher thresholds for major, breaking changes to the status quo than a simple plurality of votes.

Brexit is also unusual, as others have alluded to, in how skewed the demographics were by age, which is pretty significant if the repercussions are expected to last for a decade and affect the proportion of the public too young to vote significantly more than the proportion of the public most significantly in favour of Brexit.

The other side of that argument is that the referendum saw an unusually high turnout for a UK election and the margin as wide as those which have produced comfortable Parliamentary majorities. On the other hand, more people voted against Brexit than for any party that ever governed the UK by itself.

I don't disagree, but that's every vote. Every law affects young people more than dead people. And every time somebody like Al Franken gets elected there's a loud chorus of "It's not fair; I would have voted if I knew it would be close." What else are we going to do? Have a pre-vote to see whose vote counts double?

And: you don't need a doctorate in game theory to realise that a pre-vote wouldn't make the problem do away, it would just make it more complex to predict and speculate.

Not every vote is expected to be a one-off setting the policy direction for a generation or three. And whilst it's normal for older people to be more conservative and more reliable voters, the skew by age was unusually strong in this one (56% of 25-49 year olds voted Remain, 75% of the under 25s that actually voted voted Remain, but 56% of over 50s and 61% of those over 65 swung it in favour of Leave)

As for alternatives, I mentioned higher quorums ("If 50% of the entire electorate vote Leave, we'll leave" would have seen no change happen, at least until Cameron was undermined by his own party) which are actually pretty common for major changes in democratic votes within organizations. There were also calls for 16/17 year olds to vote although this certainly wouldn't have affected the end result.

Tangential point for futile rhetorical arguments: the split between net taxpayers vs net recipients of state benefits/pensions which I don't think any pollster has been bold enough to evaluate. Usually pensioners are strongly conservative and the unemployed and unskilled part-time workers strongly left-wing which makes "our voters are the ones paying for it" arguments redundant, but Brexit is one cause that almost certainly united the votes of pensioners and the unemployed and underemployed, and depended on them to prevail

The original vote to join the EU didn't have a 50% of the electorate quorum, so by that measure, leaving the EU is merely righting a historical mistake. :)

But the margin was nearly 2:1 in favour of joining.

Are you referring to the 1975 vote to remain in the Common Market?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Commun...

...do you think there should have been a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty?

The vote wasn't to join the EU (EEC), it was to allow the public to leave the EU (EEC) they'd recently joined, if they weren't very disinterested in doing so at the time :)

Heh, I should have checked a bit closer.

Sure, but it's not uncommon to set higher thresholds for major, breaking changes to the status quo than a simple plurality of votes.

Although that immediately raises the question of whether a vote to remain was really a vote for the status quo in any meaningful sense. What if it was interpreted as, for example, giving an active mandate for the "ever closer union" advocated by many European politicians? What if the UK found its negotiating position within the EU weakened once the long-standing threat of leaving had passed?

As we're now seeing, the in/out status alone is only a very small part of the story.

Sorry to hijack a completely unrelated comment, but you don't have an email in your profile, and I wanted to thank you for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11790879

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