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Yes, paying attention to detail is important.

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.

had to make a series of poorly-marked binary choices in a certain order to correctly deploy a bugfix

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.

> 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)

you could avoid mistakes on such an important issue

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.

If it was like this, then laws and regulations would have no real value and no authority whatsoever.

have you watched a video of how they vote?

it's a complete joke, it goes so fast the interpreters can't keep up and people end up making constant mistakes

https://youtu.be/zLh9DMuetm4?t=58

It always happens to make mistakes, I just don’t believe MEPs don’t care of the hot topic of the day every newspaper is writing about...

On the news channel I follow, at least three votes were highlighted (this one, one about adding a few countries to a list of tax havens, and one about ending the timezone switching).

This is so horrible yet I am not surprised. You'd think that at some age people would achieve a certain level of competency.

Some people are saying that the voting order was switched deliberately, knowing that some MEPs write down their votes in advance.

> 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.

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.