There has been a flurry of presbytery voting this past week with some interesting developments.  Here is a quick summary and some observations.

Following presbytery meetings last Saturday it appears from the reports that 81 out of the 173 presbyteries have voted on Amendment 10-A, quickly approaching the half-way mark of 87 presbyteries.  A potentially bigger development is the flurry of presbyteries that have voted “yes” on 10-A after voting “no” on 08-B in the last round.  The number of presbyteries switching now stands at a net change of eight towards “yes,” with nine total switching to “yes” and one switching to “no.”  Since a net change of nine is necessary for the passage of 10-A (it was 78 “yes” and 95 “no” last time) if the current trend continues it is reasonable to expect that 10-A will be approved.  However, don’t take that as a done deal because 1) part of being Presbyterian is the process and 2) just as there was a flurry of “yes” changes this weekend there could as easily be a momentum shift with a number of “no” switches in the future.  Oh, and if you are keeping count I think the vote is 46 “yes” and 35 “no.”

One of the interesting things in the past few weeks was how the three votes were tracking together — That has changed somewhat.  The first observation is that while there was a burst of voting on 10-A, there was not a corresponding burst on Belhar or nFOG.  At the present time 51 presbyteries have voted on Belhar and 47 have voted on nFOG.  Breaking it down, I have 12 presbyteries that have voted on all three amendments, 14 that have voted on Belhar and nFOG but not 10-A, 15 that have voted only on nFOG and 10-A, and 13 that have voted on 10-A and Belhar only.  That gives a total of 61 presbyteries (including my own) who have not voted on any of the amendments yet.

The second thing that struck me was a bit of a weakening of the cross-issue correlation I commented on a little while ago.  While I have not done a full recalculation of my chart to include Saturday’s voting, looking at the numbers it seems there have been a few presbyteries who have voted “yes” on 10-A and “no” on nFOG, to the point that while 10-A is currently passing nFOG is trailing 21-26.  I don’t know if it is this trend, or just a coincidence, that a few days ago GA Moderator Cynthia Bolbach in her monthly column encouraged passage of the new Form of Government and pointed readers to the nFOG blog. ( And yes, Ms. Bolbach’s statement to avoid nFOG advocacy applied only to the sessions of the General Assembly and not the voting period.) And if you are keeping score at home, both Belhar (needs 2/3 to pass) and nFOG are currently trailing, the former 28 to 23 and the latter 21 to 26.

I will leave further analysis of Belhar and nFOG for another time as well as the cross-issue trends.  But taking a more detailed look at 10-A voting we have 73 presbyteries with reported numbers for their votes on both 08-B and 10-A.  I have aggregated these 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.

At the present time the total reported number of voting commissioners is 8635, down 8% from the corresponding 08-B total of 9337.  Votes for 10-A have increased slightly from last time, 4602 to 4726, a 3% increase.  Votes against have dropped 17% from 4735 to 3909.

In the chart below I try to graphically show the different results from the presbyteries.  I use my usual margin of a 4% change (or 4 votes for small numbers) being random variation, and so the numbers in that range are considered equivalent for this analysis.  And for the chart below, the comparisons mentioned (Y>N, Y<N, Y=N) are the magnitude or the absolute value of the change in Yes and No votes.  For example, if Yes votes decreased by 15 votes and No votes increased by 6 votes, that would be counted under the “Y decrease, N increase, Y>N” box.  I hope that makes sense.

See any patterns?  There is a tendency for “no” votes to decrease — in 10% of the presbyteries they increase, in 19% the no votes are constant, and 71% of the time they decrease.  And there is a weaker tendency for yes votes to increase — in 45% of the presbyteries it increases, in 27.5% they remain the same, and in 27.5% they decrease. But if you are looking for patterns of no decreases or yes increases it is tough to make a strong argument for a consistent behavior across all the presbyteries.  The best we can say is that the two cases of decreases in “no” with stable “yes” and decreases in “no” with smaller increases in “yes” comprise about 1/3 of the presbytery vote changes.  The other 2/3 are more evenly distributed across a greater variety of cases.

OK, eyes glazed over?  The object of this extensive enumeration is to make the point that there is little in the way of strong trends that one can point at.  Is the trend for shifting from “no” votes to “yes” votes?  Yes, in several presbyteries like Central Florida where the total number was stable (a 3 vote/1% drop) but there were 17 more “yes” votes and 20 fewer “no” votes. And then there is Stockton where there were 50 votes each time but five votes shifted from “yes” to “no.”  Yes, we can say that there are fewer “no” votes overall, but sometimes that comes at no increase in “yes” votes, as in the case of Cimarron, and sometimes with a substantial decrease in “yes” votes as well, such as happened in Heartland.

Bottom line – there are a few trends but if you are looking for easy explanations (like “the conservatives are leaving” or there is a “shift to equality” ) it is hard to tease that out as a simple rule when you look on a case-by-case basis at presbytery voting.  Presbyteries are amazingly unique entities — that is what I have found in my years of tracking this stuff.  (And that does not even include consideration of weather conditions, wind direction, what show in on in prime time that evening, or who is having a conference in Phoenix.)  Believe me, I would love easy answers.  But I have lost count of the number of numerical models I have made that are either solvable but too simplistic or complex but underdetermined.

So we will see how the voting goes in the next few weeks.  We are getting enough data that I can start calculating robust statistics and frequency distributions like I have in the past.  And I will try to keep the cross-tabulation above updated as well as the cross-issue correlation chart.  So stay tuned…