MEPs accidentally vote wrong way on copyright law
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It's also possible some just understood the question incorrectly or confused it with something else, not just "misclicked".
Without knowing how often this happens in other votings it's hard to tell if this is unusual.
There are a couple of explanations being floated. First of all there where two votes, not just one, and if you wanted to vote 'correctly' against A13 you had to vote NO on the first vote and YES on the second (or vice versa to support A13), The people who voted 'wrong' voted either NO to both or YES to both.
Secondly apparently the order of voting was changed at the last minute (there where a whole bunch of things being voted on that day) so people who had written down what they where going to vote on each issue (NO,NO,YES,NO,YES,YES,NO etc.) and missed that the order had changed would end up voting wrong. Ie. they knew they wanted to vote YES on issue 27, but issue 27 was actually the 28th item voted for that day. At least two MEPs in Sweden are using this excuse.
But basically a bunch of MEPs just didn't think it was that important to pay attention to the details, phoned it in, and screwed up badly.
Indeed. Epicenter.works published a table[1] to make it easier for people unfamiliar with the voting system to follow along. It uses the same template that the MEPs use, except with the "Vote" section filled in from the perspective of someone against Art. 11/13. This might make it easier to understand why this mistake could happen but it seems clear enough that, if you're actually paying attention, you could avoid mistakes on such an important issue.
[1] https://epicenter.works/sites/default/files/copyright_dsm_fi... (PDF)
I think the other issue is that for you and me and everybody here this is a super important issue, but for many of the MEPs it's just confusing regulation nr. 843 they have to vote on this year.
it's a complete joke, it goes so fast the interpreters can't keep up and people end up making constant mistakes
I think it was the other way around actually. They first voted on whether to allow an last batch of amendments, which would have allowed separate voting on article 11 and 13 (and this vote failed by 5 votes). Then only after that they voted on the real deal.
But you would never say this about an engineering system. If you had to make a series of poorly-marked binary choices in a certain order to correctly deploy a bugfix, and someone got that wrong, the postmortem would be about what a terrible UI that is and how it has to be changed to improve system reliability. An operator making an easy-to-make mistake would never be considered "at fault".
That's how we treat things that really matter for websites. Voting in parliament is a lot more important than that. I'd rather see a real postmortem and plan for improvement, not blaming the users.
Unfortunately this is not uncommon. Tools like Jira are sometimes configured with a maze of steps and jumps around the UI (buttons, fields, dropdowns, popovers in various orders) to get a ticket into the correct state.
The only number I could find where between 2014-2015 [1], but in that year the average was 6.7 registered 'mistakes' pr. MEP. So it seems to happen quite often, I guess it only rarely has this big consequences.
[1] https://www.europaportalen.se/2016/02/svenskt-rostvelande-st...
Votes are only announced by the president which calls them in his or her native language then translated into all other languages. Quite often translators aren’t able to keep up leading to numerous errors in voting.
But I agree, the way the counting works and how they do not seem to care at all about accurate results seems ridiculous: https://youtu.be/lzigiPUXNzI
Failure of one the fundamental mechanisms of representative democratic government calls into question the legitimacy of that government, and of that system of government.
This is ammunition for the advocates of illiberal systems.
Out of all the alternatives it gives ammo to, those advocating for more local, directly democratic governance have been receiving the lions share compared to those advocating alternative authoritarian schemes.
Inside of Europe, I'm thinking about Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin. Outside, I'm thinking about Xi Jinping.
Perhaps calling into question the legitimacy of democracy is a good thing? Indeed, why is it legitimate to violate an individual's liberties through a vote of 50% + 1 of her peers?
Edit: I'll echo the peer comment that a reasonable compromise could be smaller units of government, which better represent the people. Smaller states also the limit the scope of abuse of the people within and the threat to people without.
Someone has to decide what these liberties are. You can require a greater majority than 50%, but replacing democracy by something else does not help.
Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in how their own lives are run, the exact mechanism could be many things.
https://inews.co.uk/news/brexit/brexit-vote-results-parliame...
Official vote: 312 for, 317 against, 24 abstained
Corrected votes: 320 for, 314 against, 20 abstained
It seems very rare to have that many corrections. Out of the 191 separate results in the voting record document, the only other one with more corrections was the actual vote on the directive right afterwards (but the corrections couldn't have flipped that one).
[1]: https://tildes.net/~tech/brp/europes_controversial_overhaul_...
I have seen far less critical processes with far more safety checks and redundancy in place to minimize human error.
Let's say that I'd be very careful.
however as the EU parliament has no legislative powers: we're stuck with this forever
Whether either or both of those amendments would pass on a separate vote is unknown.
I'm not exactly a euroskeptic (I love the Schengen area), but the EU has had a number of very severe missteps, such as their continued flogging of austerity that has kept southern European economies from recovery.
It's a pretty arcane system with laws drafted by the (unelected) commissioners and the EU HCoJ and sometimes (as in this case) ratified by MEP's who all too often have little understanding of what they are voting on because they weren't involved early on in their creation.
Well fuck me.
Anyway, yes, I think it's a trick, but not in the way we anticipated. There's a ton of weird language about collective licensing and collective licensing management organisations. For the most part it seems to revolve around ensuring that libraries and archives have access to what ever they need to do their job. A lot of places on the other hand it seems to be something that anyone can make use of. So if you want to make a streaming service, with old Hollywood movie and licensing the movies are impossible or prohibitively difficult, for example if it owner of the movie can't be tracked down, you can just license the movie from the collective licensing management organisation in your EU state. Or license a whole bunch of movies in one go, because licensing the right individually seems to fall under "prohibitively difficult".
I don't know, I can't read legalese, but it seems that there's a bunch of stuff that allows for easier licensing deals across Europe and I think that's what the EU is really going for. Breaking large parts of the web is just collateral damage.
Really, some lawyer need to translate this into something we can all read and understand.