Originally Posted by roughbeast

The binary vote was the key problem and the campaigns weren't sufficiently regulated! We were warned about the path we were taking by Austria, the referendum experts. They warned us that to reduce such an important and complex issue into a binary vote would invite all kinds of confusions and abuses. They warned us that the a Leave campaign could present Leave as all kinds of outcomes. anything between No Deal at one end to EEA membership at the other. People might vote for a Leave that kept us close to the single market, or they might vote Leave because they wanted as much distance from the EU as possible. This is exactly what happened. Many voted Leave because they thought, as Farage had proposed, that we would have a soft Brexit.

Farage famously told us how happy and prosperous the people of Norway were as members of the EEA, with no need to contribute to the EU regional development fund or the CAP and with a say over the rules that affected them. He lulled waverers, who feared for the economy, into believing that Brexit could be that benign. The Remain campaign could not carry out such a deception because everyone felt that they knew what Remain meant, given that we were already in the EU. It meant the status quo.

That is something else that Austria warned is about with a binary vote on such a complex and generationally important issue. They warned that a disgruntled population suffering the consequences of austerity would be looking for someone or something to blame. They warned that a Leave campaign might characterise the difficulties people were having in their lives as a the fault of the EU rather than the result of a dogmatic Tory government and the 2008 global crash. We all know that that is exactly what the Leave campaign did. They even encouraged the population to believe that immigration was causing the stress on services and that high immigration was the fault of the EU's addiction to the mobility of labour. (free movement). Stress on services was caused by austerity and failing to fund towns like Boston that had had particularly large immigration surges.

Austrian advisors suggested a different way to manage a referendum. They recommended that the run up to a referendum should be a at least a two-year process of education about what the EU really was and what various versions of Brexit might offer. The referendum itself would have needed to be non-binary. It would at least include Remain, No Deal, EEA membership and some form of customs union as options. The vote would have needed to give people the ability to put their preferences in order One , Two, Three. To avoid Remain coming out on top automatically, because Remain only has one form, the Leave options would have needed to be counted and ranked first, transferring people's second a third choices to bulk out the number of votes for the preferred Leave option. At that point the votes cast for Remain would be brought in.

Another fault with the Referendum was that it was not binding. We were warned that an advisory referendum would allow those who wanted to conduct a corrupt campaign would be inhibited by the strict rules that accompany binding votes. If one side or other in a binding vote commits significant fraud then the vote can be legally declared void. It is a matter of history what happened with the advisory vote. The Leave campaign committed industrial scale fraud, misappropriating funds so that they effectively spent far more on their campaign than allowed. . They were convicted of this and had to pay very large fines, but there was no power to scrub the result because it was only advisory.

Heard enough? I know that you will retort that Cameron and Osborne used public funds to spout Remain propaganda. This accusation could only be levelled at them because we didn't take the time to used public funds to systematically informed the electorate about the merits of Remain and Leave from at least two years before the vote. Cameron and co were compensating for the fact that this education process had not been built in.