(June 24, 2016 at 10:47 pm)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote:(June 24, 2016 at 9:05 pm)Tiberius Wrote: It wasn't even half the country. It was half of the 72% who turned out to vote.
I have a suspicion that if the turnout was 100% the result would have been a win for remain.
People that don't vote don't give a damn about the results and they don't matter.
Besides, unless the rules state otherwise the side that gets 50% + 1 is the winner. So if the pool of available voters is 50 million and only 50 bother to vote the side that gets 26 or more is the winner.
That's cute...but it's not how things work.
Counting votes is an error prone task. As such, the result is accompanied by an error bar (something like one mistake every 10,000 votes, or near that). If the error bar overlaps the 50% mark, then the voting result is unknown, no matter how many recounts one gets.
In such cases, either it gets interpreted as too close to call, and/or the election/referendum needs to be repeated.
