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Comment by tunesmith | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand (and I am very ignorant!) is why the initial vote can't just be looked at as a stage in the decision process. Time has gone on, and the public has become more educated as to what the true effects of Brexit will be. Even leaving aside the question of how dishonest the pro-Brexit arguments were. It just seems reasonable to have another vote.

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> It just seems reasonable to have another vote.

It seems absolutely unreasonable to me. It's hard to measure how certain tactics influenced the vote on either side. The voting process needs to be done with confidence and we should not so easily assume our peers are misinformed and/or so easily swayed. The efforts put forth by legitimate actors to campaign for their cause goes for not, as does confidence in the democratic process, when the outcome is just thrown away.

The voting process does need to be done with confidence.

In the first vote Leave were referred to the police for illegality, and they still haven't provided a full account of their funding - at least some of which seems very likely to have come from foreign sources.

This is explicitly and very clearly not legal, because foreign money has no business trying to influence the vote in a sovereign British matter.

So a People's Vote would be the first honest vote.

Cases like these could be made after any election ever, and we're going down a dark road by presuming this time is any different.

And then, if this second voting yields a different result, shouldn't they hold a third referendum afterwards? And maybe a few more, as you can always say the last one was not the genuine one.

Replace "should" with "could" and you'd be right. Each vote would be genuine if its conudcted according to law.

If there's always another vote, no vote needs to be implemented. What's the point of voting then?

Kids learn at an early age that when you lose, you lose. They usually grow out of "best of 3" or "best of 5" before age 10.

Even a 5 year old knows that "best of 2" doesn't work.

> If there's always another vote, no vote needs to be implemented. What's the point of voting then?

Most democracies have regular periods where you vote. Are you suggesting that since there will be a new US Presidential election in 2020 that Trump is now no longer legitimate? How would that circumstance be any different that a referdendum?

Voting isn't wrong.

What is the implication of you trying to tie the institution of democracy to childhood antics? Are you suggesting that a vote is no different that chance? That the opinion's of people that change are no longer legitimate?

A vote is not a suicide pact that binds you to a decision from now, until the heat death of the universe.

It's not best of 2 - it's a new vote. It supersedes the old one, and when you lose, you don't lose _permanently_ - in any functioning democracy, there's _always_ another vote.

If you can think of a good reason to do so, maybe. Two and a half years passing, having far more information about the process, and questions about the legality of the leave campaigns seem like perfectly legitimate reasons to hold a second vote before committing to such sweeping, largely-irreversible, constitutional change.

It's double jeopardy, there is a case for a fresh vote because new facts (May's deal/No Deal) are present. If there are new facts after this vote (for example a new A50 or similar) then there is the case for another one.

You speak as if the two questions being voted on are identical. They're not.

The first question was, should we Remain exactly as we are, or should we Leave in some totally unspecified fashion? The second question will be, should we Remain exactly as we are, or should we Leave in a no-deal hard exit, since that's the only possibility still on the table? It's no longer an abstract Leave, to which everyone can ascribe all their dreams and wishes; it's now a very specific Leave, with all the faults thereof. That may change the voting somewhat.

And, down the road, if there's another concrete Leave on the table, should the people have another referendum? Sure, why not? There probably won't be a need to vote on the negotiated Leave, though - losing by 230 votes in Parliament is probably enough. And there won't be any need to vote on a hard Brexit a second time, either - if it's voted on in a referendum, it will lose 65-35 or 70-30. (Or so I suspect, but what do I know? I'm not in the UK.)

I think the issue is that once you have had a referendum with outright dishonest arguments and likely manipulated by foreign states and one side wins by a couple of perentage points, the outcome is ironclad will of the people and even if these dishonest arguments turn out to be to many people's surprise wrong, it will not change what is the will of the people. Vice versa, any notion of asking people what they like about the actual outcome is considered pretty much hostile against democracy. Or something like that. I really can't claim to understand the argument properly.

Because this would imply a public referendum is impotent - if you don't like the outcome, you can just keep campaigning and try again later.

It was a non-binding referendum - they could have “carefully examined” the result for a week and then tossed it in the trash, politely declining the “advice” of the populace.

Oh yes, that would have gone over incredibly well.

As if what they did instead has gone over any better.

Bungling the split up a union is far better than ignoring the will of your constituents.

Assuming that a narrow result on a yes/no vote on a general concept means that the “will of your constituents” falls on one side of a complex policy issue irrespective of details of the concrete policies embedded in the available concrete realization of the broad concept that were not known at the time of the vote is quite ludicrous, even without the side that ultimately won using specific concrete descriptions as a sales pitch that conflict with that reality.

That's especially true when equally non-binding but current polling of your constituents on the same question shows that the opposite side quite likely leads now that the concrete options are known.

It's a well-established British Constitutional principal that a Parliament cannot bind a future Parliament. Why would one view the public will ant differently, even if it were fully informed?

Having a "do over" referendum and finding opinions have changed is entirely different than what the OP suggested which was ignoring the results of the referendum entirely.

Democracy means accepting that the voting public has no idea what makes good policy, but that they should determine policy anyway.

> Democracy means accepting that the voting public has no idea what makes good policy, but that they should determine policy anyway.

Representative democracy means that they determine policy by choosing representatives. It's disingenuous for those representatives to turn around and blame their own policy choices on an explicitly non-binding referendum that they sent to the public. (Especially so for a leader of the party who choose to do that specifically as a means of minimizing the impact of the issue so referred on a general election so as to preserve their partisan majority.

> they should determine policy anyway.

Then it should have been a binding referendum.

How are referendums brought to a vote? We don't have such a thing in the US. Certain states do, but not the country.

Depends on the country. In Slovenia you have to collect 40k supporter signatures or have ~1/3 of the parliament support it. And a referendum can only cancel already passed laws, it cannot pass a new law.

The one they had in UK was a non-binding one, which can usually only be brought to a vote by the parliament.

The British Parliament can do basically whatever it wants. The concepts of separation of powers and Constitutionally-mandated red tape are much less developed than in the United States.

So the answer to why anything happened in the UK, including holding a referendum, is basically just: because Parliament decided to.

> How are referendums brought to a vote?

Parliament votes to have them

> We don't have such a thing in the US.

Well, Congress doesn't choose to have them (separation of powers helps here; the Brexit referendum was very much about electoral strategy in a system where voting for a district legislator is also voting for a particular executive administration.)

> Certain states do, but not the country.

What many US states regularly have is binding referenda with Constitutional force and process; while these may sometimes be of legislative origin, they could do Brexit-style referenda (because of their general powers) but, again, separation of powers kind of eliminates the political use of them, or at least that of Brexit specifically, and a non-binding referenda on a non-profit proposal isn't something that makes a lot of sense outside of very particular political circumstances.

> if you don't like the outcome, you can just keep campaigning and try again later.

Quite honestly, there is nothing stopping you from doing this anyways. This is the point of democracy. Nothing is ever final.

Absolutely, I didn't mean to imply it's not possible, it just hurts your public image. They're looking for a solution that also lets them keep their jobs.

So presumbly if you keep trying to pass another referundum people will vote against it just out of spite. There is already pressure to not repeatedly do that, so its not a concern to argue slippery slope.

It can but no politician wants the right wing press to go all "WILL OF THE PEOPLE" on them.

It was a non-binding referendum, a glorified opinion poll and that was before we found out about the lying, the financial irregularities and external interference.

Shrugs, I'm resigned to whatever happens happening at this point.

Just like science - run the experiment until you get the right results to publish!

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