A Tale of Two Delegations
With all this hoopla about delegates at last year’s synodical convention, I decided to poke around a bit with what little data I have and see what I come up with.Before we embark upon our tale of two delegations we should review synodical bylaw 3.1.2, which states:
Voting delegates shall consist of one pastor and one layman from each electoral circuit.
- An electoral circuit shall consist either of one or two adjacent visitation circuits, as shall be determined by each district on the basis of the following requirements: each pair of delegates shall represent from 7 to 20 member congregations, involving an aggregate communicant membership ranging from 1,500 to 10,000.
- Exceptions to these requirements may be made only by the President of the Synod upon request of a district board of directors.
All the hoopla seems to stem from there being a record number of exceptions (88) to the requirements for an electoral circuit requested of the President, coupled with the rather odd fact that not even one request was denied by him.
It should be noted that two factors determine an electoral circuit — the number of congregations (7 to 20) and the total number of communicants in the circuit’s congregations (1500 to 10000). There is a degree of flexibility built in to this definition. You could have as little as 7 congregations totaling 1500 communicants or as many as 20 congregations totaling 1500 communicants. Or you could have 7 congregations totaling 10000 communicants or 20 congregations totaling 10000 communicants. If you have the latter, that circuit is a prime candidate to be split. You could have 2 circuits of 10 congregations totaling around 5000 communicants — or if you could peel off a congregation from a neighboring circuit, you could conceivably split 20 congregations (plus one more) totaling 10000 communicants (plus a few more from that one congregation) into 3 circuits of 7 congregations each, each circuit having about 3400 communicants. Splitting the circuit into 3 yields 6 delegates where there once were 2.
It works well in theory, but in reality, geography and the differing size of congregations work against splitting circuits or re-aligning them. You can’t easily split a dual or triple parish and put them in different circuits. The pastor serving the dual or triple parish can only be a member of one circuit. In parts of the country where Lutherans are scarce, a circuit of seven congregations can be spread over a large area, and might barely meet the minimum number of communicants to be an electoral circuit.
And now here follows our tale of two delegations:
District X has 196 congregations, 3.18 % of all the congregations in the synod. It has 54388 communicant members, 2.87 % of all the communicant members in the synod.
District Y, on the other hand, has 236 congregations, 3.83% of all the congregations in the synod. It has 84934 communicant members, 4.48% of all the communicant members in the synod.
It would seem reasonable to expect that since District X has 3.18% of the congregations and 2.87% of communicants in the synod, that it would have somewhere in the neighborhood of 3% of all the delegates in the synod. District Y, having 3.83% of the congregations and 4.48% of the communicants should be expected to have around 4% of the delegates. As it turns out, neither District X nor District Y had the expected number of delegates at the 2004 convention. They each had 44 delegates, 3.53% of the 1246 total delegates. It would seem that District X exceeded expectations by about half a percent, while District Y fell short of expectations by about half a percent. Half a percent might not seem like a lot until you realize that half a percent is 6 delegates.
So how is it that a district with 20% more congregations and 56% more communicants gets the same number of delegates as the other? What might account for such discrepancies between the expected and the actual? Several factors seem to have contributed to the differences. District X had 7 circuits granted exceptions, meaning that 14 of their 44 delegates, nearly one third, were there on the basis of exceptions granted by the synodical president. All 22 of their visitation circuits were counted as electoral circuits this year. District Y, on the other hand, requested and received only one exception from the synodical president, giving them 22 electoral circuits out of 23 visitation circuits. Perhaps they should have requested an exception for the one remaining circuit — the synodical president didn’t seem to have been in the mood to deny any requests that year, so why not?
Before you go off half-cocked about there being some nefarious scheme to stack the deck, another factor should be considered. For lack of a better term, I call it circuit efficiency. The politically savvy district won’t long abide having circuits closer to the 20 congregations totaling 10000 communicants standard than to the 7 congregations totaling 1500 standard. It’s not efficient. Through the simple splitting of large circuits or through re-aligning circuits throughout a district into smaller circuits, a district can extend its political voice by creating more electoral circuits from what it already has. A district with 10 circuits of 14 congregations each could increase its representation 40% by re-aligning in 14 circuits of 10 congregations each. It could increase its representation 100% if it could pull off a re-alignment into 20 circuits of 7 congregations each.
If 7 congregations totaling 1500 communicants is the most efficient configuration of a circuit for electoral votes, what then are the circuits granted an exception? I am assuming that no circuit was granted an exception because it had 21 or more congregations or had more than 10000 communicant members, and I’m well aware of what happens when one assumes…but anyway, there were 88 circuits that presumably had fewer than 7 congregations or fewer than 1500 communicants in them or both. These exceptional circuits would be superefficient, yielding voting delegates where none would have seemed even possible. District X is quite efficient, having 8.91 congregations per electoral circuit (including exceptions) and 2472.18 communicants per electoral circuit. District Y is less efficient, having 10.73 congregations per electoral circuit and 3860.63 communicants per electoral circuit. Geography probably has aided District X, for Lutherans are generally farther and fewer between than in District Y. But District Y could conceivably re-align its circuits and improve its efficiency. If District Y could achieve a similar efficiency as District X, it would add a minimum of 4 circuits. That’s 8 delegates!
These superefficient exceptional circuits do concern me, because based on the precedent set at the last convention, how small does a circuit have to get before the synodical president denies the request to make it an exception? After 88 exceptions granted and no denials, I’m not sure. Could a large congregation be declared a circuit unto itself? I wish I could say with certainty that it would not.
What if the SELC District, perhaps the most under-represented district in the synod, re-aligned its 54 congregations into 9 circuits of 6 each? Aside from geographical considerations, that doesn’t sound so unreasonable. If each circuit was granted an exception, the SELC would triple its current representation from 6 delegates to 18. At what point, then, does the exception become the rule?
For what it’s worth, and in the interest of full disclosure, District X is the Florida-Georgia District. The district president, Gerhard Michael, was once my next-door neighbor, and I bear him no ill will. District Y is the Indiana District, and I was part of their delegation in 2004.
posted by dave @ Tuesday, November 01, 2005
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