prior probability

The survey was paid for by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and the full report is available here.

This flow chart by Brian Kalt (pictured below) illustrate the complex and convoluted procedures of the 25th Amendment. Update (Noon): More ambiguities abound!

Today (6 January) is Epiphany, or “Three Kings’ Day”; pictured below is a poster commemorating Three Kings Day, a poster originally made in 1982 by Nuyorican artist Manny Vega. More details about the significance of this holy day to my Latin American brothers and sisters are available here.

The 12th Amendment contains four paragraphs, but let’s pay special attention to the second full paragraph of this amendment (in bold below), which poses two key questions:

1. First-order question: Does the President of the Senate–who happens to be the sitting Vice President under Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution–have the authority to refuse to count the electoral votes of any given State?

2. Second-order question: Who decides what the “right answer” is to the above question? The Supreme Court or the Congress?

“The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate;

“The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;

“The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.

“The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”

Created by my colleague and friend Venkatesh Rao (@vgr).

Alternate title: “Jo Jorgenson: kingmaker“

I have posted the certified margins of victory in four close States below the fold: AZ, GA, PA, and WI. Compare Biden’s margin of victory in each of these States with the vote totals of the Libertarian Party candidate. As a thank you or a token of appreciation, President-Elect Biden should appoint a prominent Libertarian to his cabinet!

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Paradoxes have always fascinated me, and one of the philosophical puzzles that has captured my imagination the most is a probabilistic problem called Newcomb’s paradox (see image below). With this background in mind, I recently stumbled across a 2020 paper by Adam Elga (Princeton) titled “Newcomb University: A Play in One Act.” Professor Elga’s excellent paper explores in depth two variants of this paradox and identifies some salient weaknesses with some of the leading approaches to this philsophical/probabilistic problem. For my part, I would like to pose a seemingly childish question, Can we all agree that this paradox cannot be solved, that there is no “right answer”? In other words, isn’t that the main point or lesson of this particular paradox: that some problems are simply unsolvable? That, at least, is the position I take in my work-in-progress titled “Judge Hercules or Judge Bayes?”

Yoani Sanchez is the future of a free Cuba. Here is her excellent essay (in Spanish); here is an English translation. After diagnosing the current situation, she correctly concludes as follows:

“Reactionary and immobile, fearful of news and distrustful of everything that has not come out of the laboratories of the Communist Party, all that remains to the current Cuban model is to repress. For the coming year it will finally set aside its mask of revolution and social justice to show itself as it is: a twentieth century dictatorship that geopolitics, chance and fear have allowed to get this far.”