Urgent Call for Scientific Standards in Government Policy-Making

California, US, 11th October 2024, ZEX PR WIRE, A report by two scientists reveals that the USA Supreme Court Voting System failed basic and essential standard scientific tests. The statistical tests are common standards in evaluating an operation, and are a requirement when evaluating a study, such as when the government mandates drug companies to establish efficacy of a drug before the drug is given approval for public use; the approval in part depends on these statistical tests.

The statistical tests were applied to the USA Supreme Court Voting System that the nine sitting judges use to decide an issue. The practice of the Supreme Court is to approve a decision by a vote where the Simple Majority Voting Standard is applied, and in this case, when 5 judges out of the 9 judges vote “yes” on an issue. The statistical tests have the scientific names “Welch’s Test”  and “AB Test” and “Binomial Test” where all of the three tests fall under the category of “significance” testing which is the most common test done to establish credibility of a result. For analogy, if a drug company presents that a drug has efficacy, it is required to show the drug to have passed the statistical significance tests that prove the drug test results are not random, that is, they are not based on pure chance. Therefore, if a drug in a study of 9 people had 5 of the 9 people helped by the drug and 4 were not helped or were harmed, the drug would not pass such a test of significance, because the test numbers would show the results could have been due to pure chance and the results show no certainty of direction for patient benefits. Similarly, a Voting System where only 9 people are involved in the vote fails the Significance test, and is rejected by scientists, because a vote of 5 “yes” against 4 “no” is a vote that can happen by chance or a vote that has no certainty in direction, in comparison to a unanimous vote that has certainty of direction. Any scientific experiment usually is dismissed if it does not pass this test.

The USA Supreme Court Voting System failed to meet even the lowest acceptable standard of 95% Confidence Level which technically is referred to as Z Score Level =  2.

In 2010, in the case of Matrixx Initiatives, Inc. v. Syracusan, the US Supreme Court dealt with the issue of “statistical significance” and that the drug company hiding such test results has adverse effects. The court opinion delivered by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a unanimous opinion (9-0) affirmed the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s judgment, concluding that the “allegations, ‘taken collectively,’ give rise to a ‘cogent and compelling’ inference that Matrixx elected not to disclose the reports of adverse events (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9121665/). The US Supreme Court seemed unaware that the mathematics of “significance testing” can also be used to evaluate a vote, such as a US Supreme Court vote, and failed to apply the significance test on itself.

This latest report notes that in recent years, the US Supreme Court required juries to have a Unanimous Vote result for the criminal courts jury voting system. Other reports by these scientists show that the mandated Jury Voting System passes these “significance tests”. This Jury Voting System was made a requirement by the Supreme Court without use of mathematics as a foundation for its decision as the transcripts of the Supreme Court Decision Ramos Versus Louisiana (October 7, 2019) shows. The decision was argued and adopted mostly based on British common law practice. And, the Supreme Court did not make the decision applicable on itself. Had the Supreme Court applied this ruling on itself, that its decisions should be unanimous to be adopted, the report by these two scientists shows that the US Supreme Court Voting System would pass these tests. In Ramos Versus Louisiana, the Supreme Court judges asked mathematical questions with the clear conclusion that these judges do not know the answers. The judges and the attorney for Ramos arguing the case made mathematical speculations and argumentations without presenting proofs to these mathematical arguments, even when such proofs exist. They argued philosophy instead of mathematics. Attorney Fisher said to the court “my core proposition to you today is that a 10-2 verdict is less guaranteed to be accurate and less guaranteed to be consonant with the purposes of jury trial than a 6-0 verdict”. In that case Justice Alito asked “what about a party that has to make decisions about how it’s going to order its affairs in the wake of a decision that it wins but does it in a 4-1-4 decision? What are they — what is that party supposed to do? Say, well, all right, we won this case, but we really can’t rely on it…” Justice Alito asked the mathematical question that is easily answerable mathematically, but this mathematics intentionally or unintentionally has clearly not been made available to the court for the judges to rely on.  JUSTICE ALITO asked : “Can I come back to the math question that was alluded to earlier? I am not myself, I must confess, capable of doing this math, but somebody could. So if you hypothesize a jury pool with a certain percentage of jurors who were inclined to acquit, and you ask is there a greater likelihood of acquittal with a 6-0 verdict than a 10-2 verdict or an 11-1 verdict or if the state decides to have a jury that’s bigger than 12, a 15-1 — a 15-person injury, 14-1; 19-1, when we get to the point where the chance of acquittal is — is in favor of the non-unanimous rule, would that be unconstitutional?” (court transcript for this case can be found at https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2019/18-5924_6j37.pdf).

The report notes that in recent years, the USA Supreme Court required juries to have a Unanimous Voting result as the criminal courts Jury Voting System. Other reports by these scientists show that the mandated Jury Voting System passes these significance scientific tests. This Jury Voting System was made a requirement by the Supreme Court without use of mathematics as a foundation as the transcripts of the Supreme Court Decision Ramos Versus Louisiana shows. The decision was argued and adopted mostly based on British common law practice. And, the Supreme Court did not make the decision applicable on itself. Had the Supreme Court applied this ruling on itself, that its decisions should be unanimous to be adopted, the report by these two scientists shows that the USA Supreme Court Voting System would pass these tests.

Asked if an official statement or a comment is available on this scientific finding “The USA Supreme Court and Congress Fail Basic Statistical Significance Tests” published on Medium.com https://medium.com/@akashkamble8488/the-usa-supreme-court-and-congress-fail-basic-statistical-significance-tests-b49f74f1ba41

The USA Supreme Court Public Information Office at pio@supremecourt.gov said ???

The report showed that the USA House Of Representatives and Senate also failed these tests. The report showed that the Senate Voting System standards need to be increased to 64 votes “in Favor” or “yes”  (64 percent) for a vote to be adopted, and this will achieve a Confidence Level of 95% or a Z Score Level = 2. But if the 100 member Senate wanted 99% Confidence Level in its votes or a Z Score Level = 3, then a higher “yes” or “In Favor” vote percentage would be required.

The House Of Representatives also failed the three basic tests, but the requirements to meet the standards were much lower because the House Of Representative has a larger number of voters which is 435. To meet the standards, the House Of Representatives would need to raise the required vote support to only 56% “yes” or “In Favor” to pass the Confidence Level of 95% which is a Z Score Level = 2. But to pass the 99% Confidence Level would require a 60% “yes” or “in Favor” majority for a vote to be adopted.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is described as the “congressional watchdog,” and says that it “provides Congress, the heads of executive agencies, and the public with timely, fact-based, non-partisan information that can be used to improve government” with “accountability, integrity, reliability”. Asked to comment on the report, GAO’s Senior Media Relations Specialist Jessica Baxter said “GAO did not conduct the study” adding “and therefore we are not able to comment on the analysis presented.”

The report standards if applied would require the US Supreme Court to change its voting system to have unanimity for vote adoption. Scotusblog.com which has tracked US Supreme Court decisions since 1995 says for the year 2021, out of 66 court adopted opinions, 29% were unanimous decisions (https://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/SCOTUSblog-Final-STAT-PACK-OT2021.pdf) adding this is “the lowest rate of unanimity in the two decades that we have been tracking the statistic”. Such percentages imply 71% of the adopted decisions for that year would have been rejected if unanimity was required. Jamil Kazoun of DecisionAccuracy.com and author of the book “A Mathematical Foundation For Politics And Law”, says the report is very good but did not include the more stringent voting standards defined by the “Vote Accuracy equation”, which requires determining the number of judges needed for the bench, explaining “Just as you would not accept a survey result done with few participants as credible, the vote accuracy standards require a minimum number of judges to be on the bench, and it is higher than 9 judges for any respectable accuracy, and this can further reduce the percentage of adopted decision. The secondary effect is that this restricts the ability of the Supreme Court and the congress to interfere in public affairs because it becomes difficult to pass any law”, adding  “Imaging a Supreme Court or a Senate with 500 members or more requiring 99% unanimity to meet vote accuracy standards. The beneficiaries of requiring these scientific standards are advocates of smaller government or no government. This is a dramatic shock to the government system and those accustomed to using the government because these reports are based on pure mathematics.” Kazoun who wrote the book “The Correct Decision” to explain the mathematical details of voting to the general public added “after decades of writing about this subject, it will be good to see mathematics in politics, not politics in mathematics.”