Complex sentence: An investigating committee in Parliament concluded that the petition contained not quite 2 million genuine signatures--it is unlikely, however, that the clerks could have counted this many signatures in the 17 hours they spent examining the petition.
Split into simpler sentences: An investigating committee in Parliament concluded that the petition contained not quite 2 million genuine signatures. It is unlikely, however, that the clerks could have counted this many signatures in the seventeen hours they spent examining the petition.