3 million Britons have signed a petition for a Brexit do-over

(Image credit: Justin Tallis/Getty Images)

A petition to Parliament arguing that "if the remain or leave vote is less than 60 percent based [on] a turnout [of] less than 75 percent there should be another referendum" on Brexit has attracted more than three million signatures from Britons since this past week's vote.

The request is so popular that its traffic briefly crashed the entire parliamentary website.

Though the effort is considered unlikely to succeed, petitioners do have on their side the fact that the original vote is technically not legally binding, so the government could (in theory) overrule it. Needless to say, the political backlash from such a move would be immense, and even a new vote might not swing results in favor of remaining in the European Union.

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Update 12:30 p.m.: Some 77,000 of the petition signatures were determined to be fraudulent and have been removed. The fake signatures — including 39,411 from "residents" of Vatican City, population 800, and 23,778 from isolationist North Korea — were the work of hackers. Outgoing Prime Minister David Cameron has also said there will not be a new vote.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.