
Young voters wanted Brexit the least – and will have to live with it the longest - tilt
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/young-voters-wanted-brexit-least-8271517
======
pmorici
People seem to think this vote is the final word but my understanding is that
it isn't legally binding and the final decision is up to elected politicians.
That's why you saw the prime minister say he would resign. He supported
staying and by him resigning new elections will be held.

~~~
chatwinra
Yes that's right. It's not legally binding and the whole exit process only
starts when the government invokes article 50 of the EU treaty, which is the
exit process and lasts 2 years.

Cameron (the PM) talked about not invoking article 50 straight away, so maybe
there's a glimmer of hope for us that voted to stay in that we still have time
for further discussions.

~~~
MichaelGG
Isn't this totally anti-democracy? Despite it not being legally binding, it
seems totally in contrary to the people's will. I don't understand positively
talking about going opposite of what people voted for.

It seems especially odd since it's usually the Leave side that's accused of
being fascist.

Or is the idea to do more polling until a favourable outcome is received?

~~~
exit
voted for by a 4% margin. don't kid yourself about what democracy actually
represents - it's not a united will.

i wonder how many of those 4% will even be alive + not senile by the time this
plays out.

~~~
de_Selby
They already appear to be senile..

------
executesorder66
Interesting idea : weigting votes based on the age of the voter. (on decisions
that have long term consequences)

Obviously this is not a solution. People will say it's unfair. Others will try
to influence the younger voters like never before. etc.

Anyone else have any other intersting ideas for this problem?

~~~
jliptzin
You could also make the counterargument that older voters are wiser and have
more experience and can make more sound decisions about the future of their
country and should therefore have a heavier influence.

I personally think you should be able to vote on an issue in proportion to how
much you care about it, but I'm not sure about the best way to go about that.
One idea I've read about is to sell votes starting at $1 and the price of your
next vote (you can vote as many times as you want) increases by the square of
the total votes purchased (i.e. $1, $4, $9...) so that by the 100th vote you'd
have to spend $10,000. But that wouldn't be a popular idea as it allows the
mega rich to buy lots of votes.

~~~
pauljohncleary
You can do something similar with voting "credits" instead of cash, everyone
gets 100 and they can use them to vote on the things they want

I've done this to help elicit requirements from stakeholders and it works
really well

~~~
IkmoIkmo
This is really interesting. I do fear it'll cause exhaustion techniques.

This may not happen in isolated experiments, but if you build a political
system on that concept, let it run for decades, in a world where a political
decision can shift tens of billions of dollars (e.g. a fiscal change for
banks, an environmental law for the dairy industry, etc), you'll see the
system get gamed.

e.g. say I propose 100 bs bills to repeal gay marriage and abortion rights. I
expect to lose, but opponents expend all their credits. Then I propose a law
banning muslims and mexicans and put all my credits behind it. The end result
is they get to keep what they had, status quo, and I get to pass something
ridiculous.

Of course it works both ways, but my point is that you're creating a system
where volume of bills is a strategy. And strategic, efficient use of credits,
starts to matter. Such that I may choose NOT to vote for something I care
about, because that credit has a premium on an even more important bill I fear
might be proposed, which I absolutely have to put my weight behind. And an
incentive not to vote doesn't sound like a system we should work towards.

At the end of the day, making something scarce like you propose does two
things; 1) it makes things more efficient and meaningful, you don't play
around with scarce things. That's great. But 2) It puts a cap on it, it's
limited in amount, and in the context of exercising your vote, voicing your
opinion, that's probably not something we should cap for people.

We already have this with financing campaigns (credits being money, which is
both scarce and to some extent capped for campaign contributions), but I don't
think it's ultimately (although super interesting) the right thing to do for
the actual act of voting.

~~~
mac01021
Definitely interesting.

The particular strategy that you propose for gaming the system assumes that
voting events are scattered throughout a term (I assume there is some period
or term after which everyone's 100 votes are replenished?) rather than all
being on the same day. If this is the case then another problem is the privacy
issue that arises when the state has to track how many votes each citizen has
left.

Both problems are solved if there is a single event each term, where you get a
single ballot containing all the questions for that term and get to fill in at
most N bubbles on the ballot, with zero or more for each question.

Such a system probably still has undesirable properties, though I'm struggling
to contrive a good example of one at the moment.

------
dnautics
The assumption here is that the Brexit will be bad for the UK. What if it
winds up being good for the UK? The EU has had some serious near-meltdowns. In
particular the issue with Greek bailouts and the conflict with germany comes
to mind. Why would you want to be part of an organization where you could wind
up being the next germany - let alone an organization where there's a
structure where 1) such an irresponsible mismanagement of funds is not
firewalled and 2) a tax compliant region (like the UK or Germany) has to pay
for the sins of a country where paying taxes is a joke?

~~~
DanBC
How's the pound doing? How's the FTSE 100? How's the FTSE 250?

[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/24/ftse-100-an...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/24/ftse-100-and-
sterling-plunge-on-brexit-panic)

[https://www.google.com/search?site=&source=hp&q=ftse+250](https://www.google.com/search?site=&source=hp&q=ftse+250)

~~~
dnautics
Markets are not generally logical, but definitely not in the short term.
Currently they're running high on emotion. We shall see.

------
DonaldFisk
The last time there was a referendum on EU membership was in 1975, and the
result was overwhelmingly in favour of staying in, so many of those older
voters who voted for Brexit must have changed their minds.

~~~
jessriedel
Well, it wasn't the EU right? It was the European Communities (EC), aka
"Common market". This was a pretty different and more modest institution back
in '75, I think.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Communities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Communities)

------
realharo
The next generation can try to rejoin if the situation in the future changes
significantly. Just not anytime soon.

~~~
gambiting
So if you are 20, then this decision is going to affect you for the most of
your working life, and you can't change it for at least a couple decades? What
sort of solution is this?

~~~
realharo
It's not a solution, just an observation.

------
digi_owl
Do wonder if it is because they have not settled in, with a family, a house,
and enough debt to last a lifetime and a half.

~~~
MichaelGG
Or they aren't old enough to be cynical yet? I'm 34 now and very pleased to
see this change. Yet 10 years ago I was opposite.

And on immigration -- the big topic -- as I see more an more things happen, I
grow more and more skeptical that countries can sustain huge influxes while
maintaining standards. I find this is true, even though I've been directly
hurt by immigration law (my wife was denied US status and overstayed a bit; my
daughter was indirectly killed by us having to go back to a bad country with
poor healthcare). So I'd benefit personally from lax immigration laws, yet I
can see it not working out overall.

Younger people seem more optimistic and more likely to find these views to be
"bigoted" or terrible. I made the same accusations at that age.

Edit: If we want to help people in countries that are not doing well (many of
them), importing people wholesale isn't the approach. Otherwise we'd just move
everyone to the US and immediately solve world war, hunger, etc.

If they're not running their own countries well, then better countries should
step in and run it for them. If your neighbor comes over claiming his house is
too dirty to live in, you should go over and help him clean, not give him your
room. National pride aside, I'd bet a lot of countries would welcome becoming
a UK, Canada, US, or EU colony. It's not like it's a rule that colonies have
to be exploitative.

~~~
alblue
The only problem is that a de-facto condition of being part of the EEA (free
access to the single market) is the acceptance of unlimited immigration
from/to the EU.

~~~
MichaelGG
Everything is negotiable. Maybe it won't be complete free access, but I find
it unlikely they can't work out something.

------
circuiter
Did this link get so many upvotes because we want the same ageism that's in
tech to be in politics and government?

------
supergirl
that's how rule of majority is. slightly more than half wanted it and now
everybody has to take it.

~~~
_delirium
That point was debated a bit around the Quebec independence referendum as
well. Is a 51% vote enough of a mandate to leave? If so, would a 51% vote in
the other direction a few years later be enough of a mandate to _rejoin_? You
have a weird unstable situation if support really is close to exactly evenly
divided, and stays that way. The pure majoritarian outcome would be that you
oscillate between trying to leave and trying to join every few years, vaguely
like what happened in Greece 100 years ago when they voted in a referendum to
abolish, then reinstate, then abolish, then reinstate the monarchy, the pro-
and anti-monarchist forces holding a new referendum every time it looked like
public opinion was trending back in their direction. In practice it seems then
the really big power comes in choosing when/whether to hold a referendum, e.g.
if the Quebec referendum had come out 51-49% in favor of leave, independent
Quebec would probably avoid as much as possible allowing a "rejoin Canada"
referendum to ever be held, lest it come out 51-49% in the other direction.

Probably some mathematical voting theory person has formalized this kind of
question in terms of something like sampling and stable outcomes, but I'm not
quite sure what keywords to look for there.

------
ben_jones
“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall
never sit in.”

------
pacala
Nice spin in the title, under the huge assumption that voting preferences stay
fixed over a lifetime. Or we could simply read the results as a confirmation
to the old adage:

"If You Are Not a Liberal at 25, You Have No Heart. If You Are Not a
Conservative at 35 You Have No Brain."

Young voters will grow old, get wiser, and possibly want Brexit more than they
did in their youth.

Now get off my lawn.

------
herbst
There was a huge propaganda machine going on targeted to the youth to tell how
awesome the EU is. I dont think taking this numbers now says actually that
much.

