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

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.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

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.