Statement to be judged: "If the proposer of a Proposal sends a PM with an initial Answer to the Question to the Secretary, but then corrects her/himself and sends a new PM with a corrected Answer to the Secretary, and the Secretary believes that the new, corrected answer is likely to be the correct answer to the Question, and that the Proposer made the correction in good faith and not tactically based on other Players' answers to the Question in the Thread, then the new, corrected Answer sent in the most recent PM shall be considered the correct Answer to the Question."

Judgment: False

Judge's reasons:

The Rules give me no direct basis for accepting that a Secretary's beliefs about a Player's motivations should govern the validity of an Answer. The Rules, on the other hand, give no guidance directly on which of multiple Answer PMs is the true PM.

Rule 277 says, of Judges, that "If the Rules are silent, inconsistent, or unclear on the statement to be judged, then they may be guided only by past Judgements, game custom, the spirit of the game, or common logic."

Past judgements are not relevant to the case in hand.

Game custom has no relevance, since no situation like this has arisen before, as far as I know.

The spirit of the game? Mmm, well is there a structurally comparable situation in the Rules to which we can compare this one, to consider the spirit of the game's approach to such situations? Yes, by golly, there is. Rule 287 describes what to do if a Player makes multiple posts all of which would, by themself, count as a vote: "If a Player makes more than one post which satisfy the above criteria for legality, only the first is legal."

Applying this to the Answer PMs, the one sent out when the Proposal was submitted should be taken as the true Answer, and not the one sent out after several Guesses had been made in the Referendum. So I judge the statement to be false.

Challenges: J5

Judgment called by: themink

Judge: deced

Judgment called at: 08/04/07 01:27 GMT

Judgment delivered at: 08/04/07 09:10 GMT