It's legit. There are thousands of petitions on that site which the government actively responds to and (if there are enough signatures) considers debating. It's not legally binding or representative of any actual guarantee or vote, though, which I assume is why the verification is pretty loose. I imagine they're pretty aware that it's just mostly just slacktivists who sign those things.
Anyway, I
really hate the idea of a 2nd referendum. I was vehemently pro-Remain and I think that leaving the EU was a terrible, terrible decision which is going to thoroughly mess things up for a lot of people for a long time, but it was democratic at least. Very much so. Everyone who bothered to vote got their say regardless of where they live or how those around them voted (constrast against the broken FPTP system). Regardless of how happy or unhappy we are with the outcome, it is a complete insult to democracy to make a petition calling for a re-vote just because you lost, and I'm pretty shocked that so many people are okay with this.
The only argument I could see for a re-vote is that the Leave voters have been lied to by Nigel Farage and his chums about the £350m/week injection into the NHS (as he publically admitted on television), along with other now-emerging lies from the Leave campaign, and so you could argue that the whole thing was deceptive and that the Leave voters were misinformed. Thing is, though, this is pretty commonplace in politics anyway; most politicians don't actually follow through with their promises, so you could extend this argument to everything - including callng for another general election.
...which is what I'm gonna talk about now, actually! Since David Cameron's resignation I've seen a load of people calling for a general election which is another kneejerk reaction from the Remain camp that I hate. Like, I get it, everyone hates Boris Johnson and my skin crawls at the idea of him being PM - but in the last general election we elected the Conservatives, not David Cameron. People complaining about the possibility of having a PM that we didn't elect should remember that we won't technically elect our PMs anyway. We voted Conservative, and we will still have Conservative. I hate the Conservatives, but again, it's what we voted for and - despite how broken the voting system that got the Conservatives into power is - it's fair. When we get a new Conservative PM after David Cameron steps down, it's fair because we voted for the Conservative Party, not David Cameron.
sooo I guess my stance on the whole thing right now is that, yes, it's completely shit. But everything that's happening, aside from the lies being exposed by Leave leaders, has been voted on and is happening accordingly. All these calls for new rules and second referendums and etc. are just angry people throwing tantrums. Yes, they have a right to be angry (and I too am very angry about this because I know full well that my career is going to need some serious redirection thanks to us having left the EU, among the other general "vote Remain" arguments), but it's embarrassing that they're channelling that anger into trying to undermine democracy.
e:
The 2nd top Google UK result after the vote: "what is the EU"
http://www.cnet.com/news/what-is-the-eu-trends-on-google-in-the-uk-as-the-country-votes-to-leave/
Some people did their democracy backwards.
Yes, that immediately looks concerning, but you can't exclude that this is from young people who don't understand what's going on or the 30% of people who didn't vote. I'd definitely have been Googling that two days ago in my early teenage years.
