Calling Jimmy Carter!

Friend and member Dr. John Horner has provided this concerning the May 20 vote:

The plebiscite at Grace CANA on May 20-26 to secede from the Episcopal Church raises a number of procedural issues that should be resolved before any fair-minded person could consider it legitimate. Regardless of whether the vote is illegal, as the Diocese of Colorado maintains, what are the procedures in place to insure that the vote itself will be valid?

Will the voting be anonymous? If parishioners are asked to place their names on ballots, will there be a reprisal against those who vote against the secession? What of those who choose not to vote? Even if the vote is anonymous a record of a parishioner’s participation in the vote will likely be kept. Will their non-participation as recorded in the census be taken as opposition to the secession by Armstrong and the vestry?

Who will do the counting? The County’s Clerk and Recorder has been slated to do the counting. But he was part of the vestry that voted to secede from the ECUSA and as such is not an unbiased observer in this process. Regardless of his credentials and his trustworthiness, he cannot be at Grace CANA for the entire week of May 20-26 to register every vote. Both Armstrong and the vestry have already stated that they will leave the church regardless of the outcome. Can either be reasonably considered impartial officials in this process?

Who gets to vote? As was demonstrated in the south before the Voting Rights Act, if you can control who votes, you can determine the outcome of any election. Grace CANA has stated that any member in “good standing may vote.” But who decides who is in good standing? Armstrong in a recent “Grace Tidings” stated that he believed “a real pruning of our parish had become necessary.” As recently as this March, members of the vestry were telling certain members of the parish that they were “no longer welcome at Grace.”—cleansing the parish before the vote to secede. Will there be any additional cleansing of the voter list before the upcoming vote?

How big of a count will be necessary in order for the vote to be considered valid? A plebiscite is a poll of all of the electorate. In the recent past Armstrong has claimed that Grace and St. Stephens is 1500 plus. Does that mean that all 1500 plus congregants must vote? Does that mean that the vestry needs a majority of 750 plus voting for the proposal? What would it mean if such a majority did vote for secession? Are the non-votes counted for the proposal or against it?

The legitimacy of an election process is essential for the governed to be willingly lead. For instance, the recent election in Nigeria was marred by ballot box stuffing and voter intimidation and the outcome of that election threatens to throw Nigeria into civil war. Will the vote at Grace CANA follow the Nigerian model? Or would Don Armstrong and the secessionist vestry employ independent election monitors to insure a valid result?

In the end, one might as well ask, what does it all mean? The reportage coming out of Grace CANA is that the vote is about whether some portion of the congregants will follow Armstrong and the vestry into CANA, taking the church property with them. But the property is under legal dispute and Armstrong himself is under a cloud of suspicion for illegal financial management of the church, and so the vote at Grace is most likely simply moot.