Ramon Llull/Raimundus Lullus (1232? - 1316. Wikicommons/ from the collection of Friderici Roth-Scholtzii Noriberg. Some rights reserved.To identify the nation’s collective will, we need to collate the voters’ individual wills. This cannot be done in a ‘yes-or-no?’ (‘remain-or-leave?’) vote in which some people say only what they do not want. So, logically, the 2016 referendum did not and could not identify “the will of the people.” This is confirmed by the fact that, today, nobody knows what the collective will actually is, and hence all the arguments about whether Brexit is to be ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ or whatever? Nobody knows what the collective will actually is, and hence all the arguments about whether Brexit is to be ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ or whatever...
If that ballot had been multi-optional – something like ‘the UK in the EU, the EEA, the Customs Union or the WTO?’ – each voter could have voted for what they actually wanted, and, if people had voted ‘sincerely’ rather than ‘tactically’ – to use the terms from social choice science – the most popular option could have been identified.
The correct procedure would have been to set up an independent commission, so to determine which options best represented the national debate; this was done in New Zealand in 1992, before they had their five-option referendum on their electoral system.
