In Guyana, a majority no confidence in parliament forces an election for president.
They had a vote last December, 33-32 in favor of no confidence.
The sitting president, who lost the vote, argued that this is not a majority, and got a judge to agree with him!
How so?
For the sake of exposition, let’s define an operator called “odd_to_even” that adds 1 to an odd number, and leaves an even number as is.
I’m going to use this because there were an odd number of member of Guyana’s parliament. Let that be n=65. So you’d need 32.5 or more to get a majority, right??
The president said no. He claimed that the way to determine the number of votes for a majority in a body with n members went like this:
odd_to_even(n)/2+1
A Guyanese judge went along with this.
But, Guyana (and other countries) doesn’t have a supreme court like the U.S. Instead, they share one called the Caribbean Court of Justice. And it ruled that this is silly, and the correct rule should be:
odd_to_even(n)/2
The latter works out as:
(n+1)/2 =(65+1)/2 = 66/2 = 33
The earlier formula works out as:
(n+1)/2 + 1 = (65+1)/2 + 1 = 66/2 + 1 = 34
I have seen some commentators say this is an order of operations issue, but I don’t really think so. Others also invoke the formula for the median of an oddly sized sample, but again I don’t see the relevance. To me it’s just an algebraic operator issue.
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