minimonkey, on 2016-November-03, 16:12, said:
So it seems that:
1) A split ruling would not have been appropriate here - because either there was an infraction or there wasn't
2) The meaning of the word 'evidence' in 21B1B is pretty important. Whilst I have been told that 'rock solid' evidence would be needed at some tournaments to avoid the directors ruling against me (a philosophy which, from the TD's perspective, I'd imagine is attractive as it reduces the amount of case-by-case judgement involved and therefor accusations of favouritism) the term is not defined in the rules (or at least nobody has defined it yet) - so it is up for the director in the specific circumstance to define what counts as sufficient 'evidence' on a case by case basis and there is no right answer?
Whether or not there is a "right answer" is a matter of opinion.
jallerton and I (together with a latter-day Scottish Nationalist whose contributions were, as one might expect, wrong without being illuminating) spent some time in Brighton some years ago establishing a precedent for a "third way" resolution of this kind of problem. It has proved helpful in subsequent cases, and I have alluded to it above.
If there is no "rock-solid" evidence to establish whether there has been a misexplanation or a misbid - in other words, if there is doubt as to what the "correct explanation" is per the substantiated version of the partnership's agreed methods - then the "correct explanation" is deemed to be: "no agreement, but the range of possibilities is..." where the ellipsis includes what North thinks and what South thinks.
The non-offenders are deemed to have had that explanation, instead of the one they were actually given or instead of the one that the Director believes they should have been given.
In most hypothetical cases as in most real cases, the non-offenders then have to guess what to do: the score is adjusted in accordance with how well the referee thinks they would have guessed. They are given considerable "benefit of the doubt", but that is all: they are not allowed to know the opponents' hands, only the opponents' methods (including the extent to which the opponents don't know their own methods).