As you probably have heard by now, last Friday (4 September) the judge presiding over the Lindsay Clancy case in Plymouth, Mass., declared a mistrial after a lone holdout juror had blocked a unanimous verdict after seven days of tense and arduous deliberations. (See here or here, for example.) Alas, I hate to be “that guy”, but this case would not have ended in a mistrial had the jury been allowed to use a simple weighted voting system known as “score voting” or “range voting“, which would have allowed the jurors to express how strong or weak they think the prosecution’s case is. For further reference, I explain in far more detail how this common-sense and intuitive voting procedure works in three of my previous papers:

1. “Why Don’t Juries Try ‘Range Voting’?“, Criminal Law Bulletin, Vol. 51 (2015), pp. 680-692.
2. “The Case for Bayesian Judges“, Journal of Legal Metrics, Vol. 6 (2019), pp. 13-20
3. “Weyl Versus Ramsey: A Bayesian Voting Primer“, SSRN (2020)

I have also blogged about score or range voting — or what I now prefer to call “Bayesian voting” — many times before:

1. Range Voting and “Making a Murderer”
2. Bayesian voting 101
3. Some virtues of Bayesian voting
4. ChatGPT: Why don’t juries use range voting?

For a technical explanation of how score/range systems of voting solve Arrow’s Paradox, see the video below: