Fraud Suspected in Anti-Brexit Petition

Petition Seeks Referendum Redo

Britain’s House of Commons is investigating the high-profile anti-Brexit petition, which got over 3.2 million signatures over the weekend, for possible fraud, with some 77,000 of the signatures already removed as invalid.

The petition was started by William Healey, ironically a campaigner for the Brexit, who feared the referendum would fail and was calling for parliament to organize a second referendum immediately after the one which last week called for the departure from the EU.

The House of Commons will generally debate anything that gets 100,000 signatures, and even though there was apparent fraud, and an awful lot of the 3.2 million signatures are from people who aren’t British in the first place, there probably are still 100,000 valid signatures within, given how tight the vote was.

Some MPs who were against the Brexit are also calling for the UK to ignore the referendum anyhow, noting that the vote was technically “non-binding.” Given the huge amount of voters, however, just ignoring it doesn’t seem a realistic option, and the call for a second referendum, though likely to at least get lip service in parliament, similarly seems all but impossible.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.