Not Much Change.
Brief enough for you? OK, you want a bit more?
As I have commented the past couple of posts on this stuff there was a bit of a question about the data, particularly for the New Form of Government vote, because the official tally from the Office of the General Assembly differed markedly from the unofficial “word on the street” numbers. Well, in the last week the unofficial lists have caught up and as of today’s release of the official numbers the differences have mostly disappeared. The official numbers always lag a bit because of the extra time required to report the votes (the Stated Clerk still does not accept reports from those of us who tweet it). So, at the moment the numbers are: Belhar – Official 44-23, unofficial 46-29; nFOG – Official 50-33, unofficial 50-39; Amendment 10-A – Official 57-37, unofficial 67-47.
For those playing along at home it appears that nFOG and 10-A are on track to be affirmed by the presbyteries but the Belhar Confession is very close and trailing the 2/3 confirmation it needs to join the Book of Confessions. Of the other 14 amendments being voted upon, 11 have now been affirmed by the presbyteries and the other three are seeing some degree of negative votes, but still on track to be affirmed.
As usual, my data is aggregated
from numbers from Twitter as well as vote counts at the Covenant Network, Yes on 10-A, Reclaim Biblical Teaching and the Layman.
This aggregation is available in my spreadsheet and my cross-vote spreadsheet through yesterday’s
reports.
What appears to have happened is that the Layman and Reclaim Biblical Teaching lists, which are the ones that track the Belhar and the nFOG voting, have gotten a bunch of new data on nFOG. The good news is that new data is always good and makes my analyses more reliable. The bad news is that most of these are unrecorded votes meaning that either the vote was taken by voice or a show of hands and not counted out, or the counted data was not available to the reporting groups. The bottom line is that there is not much new for my strength of voting analysis so I’ll let my previous one stand for the moment and just look at the cross-tabulation of the “yes/no” votes.
So here are the correlations:
| n=52 | Belhar Yes |
Belhar No |
| nFOG yes | 25 48% |
3 6% |
| nFOG no | 4 8% |
20 38% |
| n=48 | Belhar Yes |
Belhar No |
| 10-A yes | 27 56% |
3 6% |
| 10-A no | 4 8% |
14 29% |
| n=65 | nFOG Yes |
nFOG No |
| 10-A yes | 28 43% |
6 9% |
| 10-A no | 10 15% |
21 32% |
Well, there is a little shift, but the same quantitative pattern holds and the shifts are mostly minor. The Belhar/nFOG correlation is now tied for the best with 86% of presbyteries voting the same way on both issues (down slightly from 90% last time) and 14% opposite voting. Yes, now Belhar Yes/nFOG No has one more vote than the other combination while it had one less vote last time — still pretty similar.
The Belhar/10-A correlation is interesting because it has the same number of opposite voting presbyteries as the Belhar/nFOG correlation and within the rounding this gives essentially the same percentages – 14% opposite and 87% same. The previous analysis had 83% of the presbyteries voting the same so there is a slight increase in the correlation.
Finally, we have the least favorable correlation, the nFOG/10-A voting, and the numbers are very close to the previous analysis, and maybe a bit better correlated. Previously, within the rounding, 75% of the presbyteries voted the same way on both issues and now we have the same number again. Last time the opposite votes were the same and now we see a slight tendency for a presbytery that votes no on 10-A to still support a yes vote on nFOG. In fact, since the previous analysis only one more presbytery has been added to the count that voted yes on 10–A and no on nFOG.
What does it all mean? Well, for the data crunchers like me it is nice to see that the larger quantity of data supports the preliminary analysis I did before. We are still only at about 1/3 of the presbyteries in any one of these comparisons so this is still in a preliminary mode, but it is valuable to see that as the data set grows the basic trends remain the same. It is also suggestive that we can have some confidence in the previous analysis that used the strength of voting.
It also continues to encourage us to ask the question of why these votes are correlated. I’ve pondered that in the previous posts so won’t repeat it again in print until the data set has filled out substantially more. Some of you have suggested additional variables to look at with the strength of vote numbers to help clarify that question a bit. When the strength of vote data has increased some more I’ll revisit it again.
This continued trend does not however allow up to say anything about the time trend of the data. These data have no associated date information and just because they were added in the last week does not mean that the votes were taken in that time period. So while they have the same trend we can not say that the voting trend truly “continues” in a temporal sense.
Anyway, a little lunch hour diversion and we will watch the voting continue and await more data. The rest of this week I have a heavy meeting schedule so I’ll try to catch up on some global Presbyterian issues over the weekend. Stay tuned…