{"id":24181,"date":"2016-07-14T21:02:25","date_gmt":"2016-07-15T01:02:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/?p=24181"},"modified":"2016-07-14T23:23:29","modified_gmt":"2016-07-15T03:23:29","slug":"general-secretary-michael-thompson-changes-his-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/general-secretary-michael-thompson-changes-his-story\/","title":{"rendered":"General Secretary, Michael Thompson changes his story"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, Michael Thompson issued a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.anglican.ca\/news\/statement-vote-count-marriage-canon-resolution-051-r2\/30016476\/\" target=\"_blank\">statement<\/a> explaining what caused the chaos surrounding the marriage canon vote. I wrote an <a href=\"https:\/\/anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/anglican-church-of-canada\/something-fishy-in-the-marriage-canon-vote-recount\/\" target=\"_blank\">article<\/a> casting doubt on the plausibility of the explanation; subsequently, David Virtue picked up the story and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.virtueonline.org\/canada-behind-scenes-bullying-synod-over-same-sex-marriage-resolution\" target=\"_blank\">republished it in VOL<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In yesterday\u2019s statement, Thompson <em>explicitly<\/em> says the error was caused not by his being categorised as a layperson but by his being placed on the non-voting clergyman list (my emphasis}:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It was at that point that Mr. Copeland, the person supporting the electronic voting, discovered that it was in fact my own vote as General Secretary that had been overlooked in the electronic count. Initially, we thought that it had been miscoded as a lay vote, rather than as a clergy vote. We have since been provided, by Mr. Copeland, the list from which the electronic voting was coded, a list prepared by my office. <strong>That list described the General Secretary as \u201cclergy, non-voting\u201d. Data-on-the-spot simply coded the information that my office gave them.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Now, he is claiming the opposite: that, although his office placed him in the non-voting column on a spreadsheet, before synod started, Data on the Spot did not &#8220;simply code[d] the information that my office gave them&#8221;. The contention now is that Thompson was entered as a voting lay member <em>manually<\/em> by Data on the Spot\u2019s J.P. Copeland. Copeland says he has no record of who requested the manual change or how it was entered incorrectly.<\/p>\n<p>That invites the questions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Who spotted the initial error?<\/li>\n<li>Who created the second error?<\/li>\n<li>Who requested the change?<\/li>\n<li>Was it the second JFK gunman? Elvis?<\/li>\n<li>I know it\u2019s Anglican, but are we really being asked to believe that so much incompetence is concentrated into one small office?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As much as I dislike conspiracy theories, I cannot help being just as suspicious now as I was before the second explanation emerged.<\/p>\n<p>From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.anglicanjournal.com\/articles\/the-vote-on-same-sex-marriage-what-went-wrong\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a> (my emphasis):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The error, according to Thompson, \u00a0originated with an Excel spreadsheet compiled by his office, which listed him and General Synod Chancellor David Jones as being non-voting members of General Synod. <strong>The spreadsheet had listed Thompson as \u201cclergy, non-voting.\u201d<\/strong> According to the Constitution of General Synod, both the general secretary and the chancellor have full voting privileges.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis was an error that took place in my office,\u201d Thompson said in an interview with the <em>Anglican Journal.<\/em> \u201cIt is not an error that was caused by the electronic voting. It is a mistake that we made\u2026[Data-on-the Spot] simply took the information that we gave them and accurately coded it into their electronic system.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Thompson had previously issued an apology on the floor of General Synod in which he noted that the \u201cgood order of General Synod is my responsibility as general secretary\u2026[and] I want to apologize to the General Synod for the confusion that has been caused.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The issue of Jones&#8217;s and Thompson\u2019s voting privileges was brought to light the day before synod began, said J.P. Copeland, integration specialist for Data-on-the-Spot (DOTS), the electronic voting services provider contracted by General Synod to manage the voting by clickers. <strong>When Thompson was manually added to the list of voting members, however, he was wrongly coded as a layperson, instead of as a member of the Order of Clergy<\/strong>\u2014a fact that was discovered only after a printed list of how General Synod members had voted was examined.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cIt was literally like a hand addition that was communicated to me,\u201d Copeland told the <em>Anglican Journal,<\/em><\/strong> <strong>speaking of the request to have Thompson added to the voting list. \u201cI don\u2019t have a record of where it came from, who told me what, or whether I heard improperly or whether I read it improperly.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, Michael Thompson issued a statement explaining what caused the chaos surrounding the marriage canon vote. I wrote an article casting doubt on the plausibility of the explanation; subsequently, David Virtue picked up the story and republished it in VOL. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/general-secretary-michael-thompson-changes-his-story\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[2370,1085,1390],"class_list":["post-24181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglican-church-of-canada","tag-gs2016","tag-michael-thompson","tag-same-sex-marriage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}