On Thursday in Strasbourg, 314 Members of the European Parliament voted to reject the return of "Chat Control," the legal regime allowing tech companies to scan the private messages of roughly half a billion Europeans.
Only 276 voted to keep it.
So naturally, the scanning regime won - thanks to a 'quirky' voting procedure in Brussels that allowed legislation to survive even though most MEPs who cast a vote opposed it. That should alarm anyone who still believes the word "parliament" is supposed to mean something.
The vote took place at second reading, under an urgent procedure pushed through just two days earlier by Parliament's largest bloc, the centre-right European People's Party.
At second reading, the arithmetic is rigged toward passage. Rejecting or amending the text does not require a majority of votes cast. It requires an absolute majority of all 720 MEPs: 361 votes.
That means every absent MEP and every abstention effectively counts in favor of the law.
On Thursday, 607 members voted: 314 to reject, 276 to proceed, and 17 abstained. Another 113 were not in the chamber. The rejection therefore fell 47 votes short of the required threshold. A clear majority of voting MEPs opposed the measure - and the measure became law again anyway. Not coincidentally, the vote was scheduled for the final sitting day before Parliament dispersed for its summer recess, when absenteeism is at its annual peak.
The path to this outcome is as important as the result. Parliament had already rejected an extension of these same rules on 26 March. The regulation then expired on 3 April. In any functioning democratic system, that would have been the end of it. Instead, the Council returned on 2 July with essentially the same text, repackaged as a new proposal. Then, on 7 July, the EPP secured an urgency procedure by a narrow 331-to-304 vote, bypassing committee scrutiny and setting up Thursday's vote under second-reading rules.
Marketa Gregorova, the Greens/EFA negotiator on the file, accused the EPP of violating Parliament's own rules of procedure and abusing its position to force a re-run of a question the chamber had already answered. She was right to do so.
When a legislature can be made to vote on the same question repeatedly, under progressively worse rules, until it produces the desired answer, the word "vote" begins to look decorative.
What was revived on Thursday is "Chat Control 1.0" - the ePrivacy derogation first adopted in 2021 - not the broader permanent proposal commonly known as Chat Control 2.0.
The revived regime permits, rather than requires, providers such as Meta, Google and Microsoft to scan private messages, emails and uploaded images on unencrypted services for child sexual abuse material. It will now run until April 2028, unless permanent legislation replaces it first.
Parliament did manage to push through two concessions. Amendments exempting end-to-end encrypted services passed with 369 and 362 votes, carried by an unusual coalition spanning liberals, the left and parts of the right. That matters: Parliament is now formally on record against breaking encryption.
But as civil-rights campaigner Patrick Breyer notes, the victory is partly symbolic. Providers cannot meaningfully scan end-to-end encrypted content in the first place without undermining the encryption itself.
The more revealing vote was the one that failed. An amendment to restrict scanning to individuals actually identified as suspects by the judiciary won a clear plurality, 322 to 255. But because it also needed 361 votes, it died.
In other words, a majority of voting MEPs wanted scanning limited to actual suspects. Europe got suspicionless scanning of everyone instead.