MP slammed for saying ‘Revoke Article 50’ petition is fraudulent

More than 5,872,384 have now signed the petition.

The head of parliament’s petitions committee hit back at claims the ‘Revoke Article 50’ petition was compromised overseas.

Helen Thorpe MP said 96 per cent of signatures came from within the UK, and that there are several systems in place to detect fraudulent signatures, for example from bots signing automatically.

It came after fellow MP Maggie Throupe said the current system ‘leaves our democracy potentially under threat from manipulation from foreign state aggressors.’

In angry words in the House of Commons, Ms Thorpe said: ‘Can you ensure that if members want to undermine the most successful parliamentary petition system in the world, they do so on the basis of facts, and find out those facts from the committee before they raise them in this chamber?’

Ms Throupe had earlier asked the prime minister to ‘reform the government’s online petitions system, which currently accepts unverified signatures from across the world.’

She claimed: ‘This fundamental flaw can produce an inaccurate reflection of public opinion on important issues such as revoking Article 50, and leaves our democracy potentially under threat from manipulation from foreign state aggressors.’

The petition to Revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU now stands at 5,872,384 signatures.

It is the most popular and fastest petition ever started on the government’s website.

Each vote requires an authenticated email address and a verifiable UK post code in order to be counted.

Theresa May responded that verification of signatures was a ‘very important issue’.

Also, the correlation of peak colouring to some very specific constituencies (of the 'Tiggers', Greens and strong London remain areas) show that it is unlikely bots are gaming the petition. Highly unlikely Bots would code in such skews in the entries.

— Richard Swinford (@RichSwinford) March 22, 2019

However, she said petitions are already ‘subject to checks as part of due diligence’ and said there needed to be a balance between allowing people to ‘easily register support for issues while discouraging dishonesty. ‘

Responding to Ms Thorpe, speaker John Bercow said: ‘I don’t think it’s for me to advise on the identification of facts, which I imagine would be an extremely lengthy exercise.

‘I would like to acknowledge the outstanding work of the petitions committee.’

We looked into the science of whether the petition is being gamed here.