This market will resolve to “Yes” if any Federal or State jurisdiction of the United States unseals or otherwise officially announces a criminal indictment of former President Donald Trump before the resolution time March 31, 2023, 11:59:59 PM ET. Otherwise, it will resolve to “No”.
Please note, for purposes of this market, the District of Columbia and any county, municipality, or other subdivision of a State shall be included within the definition of a State.
Note also, that an indictment that has been issued before the resolution time but remains sealed or otherwise secret at the resolution time will not be considered in this market.
Resolution criteria from https://polymarket.com/event/will-donald-j-trump-be-indicted-by.
Edit just to be clear: This market will resolve the same as Polymarket.
Mar 30, 8:32pm: Will Trump be indicted by March 31? → Will Trump be indicted by March 31? [Polymarket question, see details]
Some general commentary, mostly copied from below:
I think it's important to note that while this Polymarket question turned out to have badly written criteria that contained an unexpected contradiction, and that is an issue that does occasionally happen for questions with detailed resolution criteria, it's far more common for underspecified questions to have issues and be ambiguous.
The questions that just said "Will Trump be indicted by March 31?" all could easily have been ambiguous, e.g.
what if he was indicted at 1 am Eastern on April 1?
what if he was indicted in another country?
what if the grand jury had voted to indict on March 31 but the news didn't break until April 1?
Those are all cases that the other questions would have been ambiguous and this one would not have been. Unfortunately, the question turned out to be ambiguous in a different way. But it's still almost always better to specify the question in more detail.
@ScottLawrence I'm glad it resolved YES, I think that's the resolution that best follows from the resolution criteria.
@jack I keep missing the polymarket site and posting false things. Apparently voting isn't over yet--6 hours to go.
@JonathanRay I find it pretty sad that this is what he is being indicted for. Of all the crimes committed by current and former presidents, from waging wars under false pretenses, to recklessly bombing areas, to just flat out murdering people, let alone massive amounts of corruption, a small payment seems to be completely insignficant.
@MarcusAbramovitch How can it be a campaign finance violation to spend your own money supporting your own campaign by paying some pornstar to shut her big fat mouth? Even if it was channeled through a lawyer for secrecy or whatever, it's a big fat nothingburger.
@JonathanRay The crime is falsifying business information - the crime isn't the hush money, but recording it as something other than hush money. On it's own, it's just a misdemeanor, just a nothingburger, like you said. However, if they can prove that it was in service of another crime, then it's a felony. Since the DA wouldn't go after him for a misdemeanor, they must also be indicting him for a different crime or crimes as well. We don't know yet what that is (we should sometime next week), but there are supposedly 34 separate charges on the indictment.
To anyone who doesn't know, Polymarket uses UMA to decide markets. There is a discord for it where the UMA holders/voters are explaining their reasoning for their votes and they all seem to be in agreement that this resolves YES and is shifting the market accordingly. Furthermore, some are considering https://twitter.com/frankrunyeon/status/1641836564975177728 to be further proof of an unsealing.
@MarcusAbramovitch seems like solid evidence to me. I don't get why polymarket is still trading so low.
For those who don't want to predict on the uncertainty of how Polymarket resolves, I totally understand and that's an unfortunate surprise for me as well as you, but that's how it goes sometimes.
I'll make this offer for those who hold YES and don't want to wait on that uncertainty: If you want, I'll buy your shares from you at cost or at 80% (which is above current market price), whichever is better for you, until I run out of NO shares I currently have. I'll just set a limit order which you can feel free to fill. (Note this is a loss for me, if I were just profit seeking I wouldn't offer to buy so high).
I think such an offer is less relevant for the NO holders, whose shares are probably worth more than they initially expected.
And just want to note, the bad resolution criteria here are obviously Polymarket's fault, and theoretically I could have noticed the problems but we all know how hard that is to spot in advance. I will probably make more Polymarket mirror markets in the future and include more language about what exactly happens in Polymarket resolution edge cases.
@jack I think it's difficult to blame you here. You have resolution criteria unlike the other markets. I was the one who made the mistake of not realizing their equivalence.
@jack, in general, i wish to see more markets with resolution criteria, clearly stated (even if it leads to confusion sometimes) than a market with little to no resolution criteria that resolves ambiguously
@jack I got hit particularly badly and am not in the group of NO-buyers from the start. Kindly buy my NO at cost-for-me (80ish I think?) so that you can keep up your efforts.
@lorxus I calculated from your profile, your average cost was at 85%. You can set a yes order there and I'll fill it.
@jack I calculate average at 83%. I assume that's acceptable and will be setting large limit orders there.
@MarcusAbramovitch I set a buy at the same price, if you could sell the extra shares you got there, thanks
@jack Genuinely, thank you. I'm not new to explicit reasoning or the idea of prediction markets, but I am new to being here and understanding community norms. Had you not done that I was seriously considering throwing in the towel here and finding a different site, or putting prediction market activity on hold indefinitely. I only hope I can be as magnanimous in my market-resolutions towards others in future.
@lorxus Glad to hear that. People on Manifold are often generous, but do keep in mind that most prediction markets, both on Manifold and elsewhere, just try to follow the specified criteria as well as possible, and sometimes you end up stuck with no good choices, and it isn't really anybody's fault in particular. Or more often it's something like having a market resolve against you in a way that is clearly correct but feels like a dumb technicality. Just have to accept some amount of that because turning the real world with all its complexities into a yes or no question is really hard!