Enough MEPs Say They Mistakenly Voted For Articles 11 & 13 That The Vote Should Have Flipped; EU Parliament Says Too Bad

from the well-that's-messed-up dept

Earlier today we wrote about the terrible vote by the EU Parliament to approve the Copyright Directive including the dangerous Articles 11 and 13. As we noted in the original post, the key vote was whether to allow amendments that could have deleted those two articles. That vote failed by just five votes, 317 to 312. Unfortunately, soon after the vote was finalized, a few of the MEPs who voted against the plan for amendments -- Peter Lundgren and Kristina Winberg -- said they voted incorrectly and meant to vote for the amendments in order to get rid of Articles 11 and 13. Apparently, someone changed the vote order which threw them off:

What happened was that in the middle of a sitting meeting, it was decided to make an adjustment in the order of voting in itself. This did not appear in a clear way where the President was also somewhat confused.

Indeed, soon after that some others admitted to voting incorrectly, believing they were voting for something else.

A few hours later, the EU put out the official voting record which includes an astounding 13 MEPs who said they voted incorrectly. Ten of them said they meant to vote for amendments. Two of them said they wanted to vote against it. And one did not want to vote. As you can see in the screenshot below, everyone next to the "+" would have voted for the amendments if they had actually realized what they were voting on.

All told, that would have shifted the vote and allowed for a vote on amendments. By a slim majority, the law would have been opened up to deleting Articles 11 and 13. In other words, whoever changed the order of the vote pulled a fast one and got the EU Copyright Directive approved... despite the EU Parliament not clearly agreeing on that. If you're wondering what can be done now... the answer is not much. According to the EU:

MEPs may still issue corrections to their vote in case of mistakes, which will however not change the outcome

The vote the clicked on is the vote they got. It is frustrating beyond all belief that we ended up killing the open internet through tricking a bunch of MEPs by switching the voting order. Incredible.

Filed Under: article 11, article 13, changed votes, copyright, eu, eu parliament, votes