Shuck and Jive


Saturday, January 22, 2011

A Net Gain on Amendment A!

A good day of voting on Amendment A. This is the amendment that would remove the effective "don't ask don't tell" policy from the PC(U.S.A.) Eight presbyteries voted. Six yes and one no and one yet to report.

The story is Eastern Virginia. This presbytery had voted against equality in 2008-9 and flipped for justice this time around. The other yeses had been yeses last time and the one no had been a no. The one we have yet to hear from was a strong no in 2008-9. So we had a net gain of one presbytery.

Thank you and very nice work in all the presbyteries, especially Eastern Virginia!





Eastern Virginia you get today's Flipper Award!
  • Eastern Virginia 87-69 (Woot!)
  • Gennesee Valley 85-29
  • Cayuga-Syracuse (unanimous yes voice vote)
  • Elizabeth 63-46
  • Mid-Kentucky 99-9
  • San Jose 78-57
No votes:
  • Beaver-Butler 27-73
Yet to report:
  • Upper Ohio Valley (last time went no 12-72--so expecting a no)
The overall score is 15 yes and 19 no with 87 being the magic number to make a huge difference in ending discrimination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

For updates follow Covenant Network and More Light Presbyterians and see the vote chart.
Posted by at

6 comments:

  1. KattieSaturday, January 22, 2011 8:25:00 PM

    Yes, that is good news!

    My predictive model now has the final presbytery vote count at 91-82 in favor of passage. That's a drop by three favorable votes since the previous prediction.

    Check out the current prediction at:
    http://home.comcast.net/~KattieW/Votes/

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  2. irreveranceSaturday, January 22, 2011 8:50:00 PM

    Hey Kattie, interesting chart. How did you come about the figures in your predictive model?

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  3. UnknownMonday, January 24, 2011 5:15:00 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. John ShuckMonday, January 24, 2011 5:38:00 PM

    Thanks for the comment Mary and for the great work in Eastern Virginia. I thought that the repeal DADT would have a huge effect. Of course your efforts make it happen!

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  5. KattieMonday, January 24, 2011 7:11:00 PM

    I heard a little while ago that Western Reserve passed 10-A today 91-31.

    I updated my predictions with this new bit of data, and once again the predicted yes presbytery vote dropped. Now it's 90-yes to 83-no.

    It's really weird, it seems that almost every time a traditionally pro equality presbytery votes yes, the predicted yes vote drops, and every time a traditionally anti equality presbytery votes no, the predicted yes vote increases.

    The reason appears to be that the conservative presbyteries are shifting toward yes to a far greater degree than the progressive presbyteries are.

    To answer Irreverance's question: The model starts with the simple and utterly indefensible (see above) assumptions that people are the same everywhere, and that pressures to change are felt uniformly across all presbyteries. I look at how the presbytery votes on 10-A this year shifted from the votes on 08-B, I also look at how the number of voters shifted between 08-B and 10-A. I apply these same kinds of shifts to the remaining presbyteries to see how they might be expected to vote. Every time a presbytery votes, I update the prediction with the new data.

    I did this same kind of analysis to predict the outcome of 08-B, and I was surprised at how quickly it converged to the actual outcome, so I decided to try it again for 10-A.

    So far it has correctly predicted well in advance all the presbyteries that shifted from no to yes (all 2 of them). :-)

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  6. irreveranceTuesday, February 01, 2011 11:50:00 AM

    Hey, Kattie, thanks for the info. It will be interesting to see how closely it predicts the votes.

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