Or they couldn't vote (besides work and caretaking, Wikipedia mentions that a few thousand's ballots were invalid before the vote even started due to an accounting error), or they thought "don't give our neighbors the finger" was a foregone conclusion. I should also hope that such a vote in my country, where it's economic suicide much more than in the UK, goes to an easy "no", but since Brexit I've learned that I need to always encourage everyone to make time and vote anyway no matter how dumb it seems. They didn't have that example and I'm not so sure if a confirming vote would habe turned out the same way for example

You can say a lot of things about the majority of this group but not that it was necessarily irrelevant to the whole group