The Arithmetic of April 9

Who Supplied the Majority — In the Record’s Own Numbers

I. What the Written Record Recommended

The Special Committee’s written materials addressed six allegations. The disposition recommended on each:

Three censures. Two reprimands. One private reprimand. Nowhere among them does the penalty rise to removal.

Nowhere in the written materials does the word removal appear as a recommendation.

II. The Unwritten Recommendation

After the six written dispositions were complete, the presiding officer told the Board the committee’s recommendation was removal. Asked under oath whether the committee’s written report contained any such recommendation, he answered:

That recommendation appears in none of the committee’s written materials — a point the presiding officer conceded under oath, and one the Pennsylvania court examined directly.

The Pennsylvania court examined this same sequence. Its Findings of Fact of September 16, 2025 place two findings side by side. First, from the presiding officer’s own sworn testimony:

And second, what the Board was told:

By the presiding officer’s own sworn account, the committee never discussed removal as a sanction or outcome. The recommendation he announced to the Board as the committee’s had, on his own testimony, never been made by anyone — and it appears in no written record the committee produced.

The written record recommended censure. The removal recommendation existed only in speech, was introduced by the presiding officer, and was disclosed to its subject before deliberation began. The reader may consult the minutes, and the court’s findings, and confirm the sequence.

III. The Roles, As the Record Assigns Them

The minutes’ own footnote states that the Special Committee — the investigating body — was chaired by GSA-E Jesse Tyson and included Archons Roman, Bradley, Ahmad, and Heard.

From the body of the minutes, the record then assigns each man his roles — by name:

• GSA-E Jesse Tyson chaired the investigating committee; presided over the executive session that judged that committee’s findings; introduced the removal recommendation the committee never wrote; cast a vote on the removal of the officer whose seat he would assume; and, upon the removal, succeeded to the vacated office.
• Grand Thesauristes Derrick Roman — the financial officer through whose office the questioned expenses were approved and paid — sat on the committee investigating those same expenses, presented the evidence on five of the six charges, seconded the failed motion to escalate, and then made the motion to remove. Approver, investigator, prosecutor, and movant: one office, four roles, the same expenses.
• Grand Grammateus Darrell Searcy prepared the minutes of the session — the document in which the written dissent of Section V appears as an absence, and which the Fraternity itself later filed with the Pennsylvania court. He has a second role as well, in the Fraternity’s federal lawsuit in Atlanta. To ask that court to stop a member’s letters from reaching the membership, the Fraternity must give the judge a sworn, signed account of the facts. Both times it has asked, the signature on that sworn account has been Searcy’s. The officer who recorded the dissent as an absence is the same officer whose sworn word asks a court to keep letters like these from reaching you.
• Archon Stefan Bradley, a member of the investigating committee, cast the written vote against removal that Section V documents — the vote that was never counted.

Every name, title, and act above is assigned by the minutes themselves. None requires interpretation.

IV. The Arithmetic

The minutes record the roll call on removal — eight in favor, four against:

† Member of the Special Committee — the investigating body. The fifth committee member does not appear in the roll call; his vote is the subject of Section V.

Now perform the one calculation the minutes invite but never state. Set aside the four votes cast by the investigators themselves — the members of the committee that authored the charges — and count only the board members who came to the table without a hand in the prosecution:

The investigators supplied exactly half of the votes for removal — and with them, the entire margin. They were also the same men whose own written recommendations stopped at censure — a contradiction Section VI takes up. The board, without the votes of the investigating committee, did not produce a majority for removal at all. It divided evenly. The subject of the vote was not permitted to cast his own — though under Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised (12th Edition), the parliamentary authority the Bylaws adopt, no member can be compelled to refrain from voting, even on a question in which he is personally interested. And one vote is missing from the count altogether — which brings us to the fifth member of the Special Committee.

Whether eight votes could lawfully remove a Grand Officer where the Bylaws require two-thirds of the entire Board is the question now before the Pennsylvania Orphans’ Court, which has issued preliminary findings that the removed officer is likely to prevail on the merits. But the arithmetic above requires no court and no bylaw. It requires only the roll call, the footnote, and division by two.

V. The Fifth Vote

The minutes list Grand Rhetoricos Bradley in attendance from 10:48 AM until 12:23 PM, and record him as “ineligible to vote due to early departure” — a disqualification no bylaw of the Fraternity contains.

A contemporaneous written record from that day — timestamped and preserved in its original form — shows what the minutes do not. Before stepping away, he cast his vote in writing:

The same record shows him writing again at 2:14 PM — “Please send zoom link. I’m not getting in” — four minutes after his stated return time, trying to rejoin. His vote appears nowhere in the roll call. The minutes record it as an absence.

This is not a private allegation. The vote was the subject of sworn testimony in July 2025, and the Pennsylvania court’s Findings of Fact recite it: Archon Bradley “sent a text to other investigative committee members stating that his vote was ‘against removal (in the aggregate)’ if he didn’t make it back”; “[s]hortly after Mr. Bradley sent this text, Grand Sire Elect Tyson put the removal of Mr. Douglass as the Grand Sire Archon to a vote”; and “[n]either Mr. Bradley nor Mr. Douglass were given the opportunity to vote on the motion.” (Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, Sept. 16, 2025, citing Hearing Tr., July 2, 2025, at 54:3–6.)

Three consequences follow, and each is arithmetic, not argument:

The committee was not unanimous. The investigating body’s own fifth member voted against removal. With his vote restored, the committee itself divides four to one — and the dissent was converted into an absence by the minutes that omitted it.

The theory predated the Board’s deliberation. His vote is cast “against removal (in the aggregate)” — read at 12:22 PM. Removal-by-aggregation was introduced on the floor later, by the presiding officer, as a recommendation that appears in no written record. A member cannot vote against a theory that does not yet exist. The aggregation question was formed, named, and contested before the Board ever heard it.

The count fails on every theory. Restore the fifth vote and the tally reads eight to five. Eight of thirteen is 61.5 percent — short of two-thirds of those voting, the standard the administration itself has urged. Two-thirds of the entire fourteen-member Board — the standard the Bylaws state — is ten. Under either reading, eight votes did not remove a Grand Sire Archon.

VI. The Unexplained Contradictions

One feature of this record deserves to be stated plainly rather than left for the careful reader to decipher.

The record holds not one contradiction but two. The committee contradicts itself. Its signed report recommends censures and reprimands — never removal. Its own members then supplied every vote of the margin by which removal passed. The same men signed the one and voted the other, on the same day. The presiding officer contradicts himself. On April 9 he told the Board that the committee’s recommendation was removal; in July, under oath, he acknowledged that the committee never discussed removal at all. Nothing in the minutes accounts for either distance — and the two cannot be explained apart, because they share an author: the committee’s chair and the session’s presiding officer were the same man.

The aggregation theory resolves neither contradiction. It deepens both. Section V establishes that removal-in-the-aggregate was formed, named, and contested among the committee’s own members before the Board ever heard it. Yet the presiding officer testified, under oath, that the committee never discussed removal as a sanction or potential outcome. Stand the records together and they cannot all be true. If the committee did consider the question, the sworn testimony is wrong — and the report its members signed omits a recommendation they had debated. If the committee never considered it, then the “recommendation” announced to the Board had no proceeding behind it — and the question reached committee members through some channel outside the committee’s work. There is no third reading. And on either path, the same fact survives: if the committee believed the aggregate of the charges warranted removal, the place to say so was the report it signed. They did not write it there. They did not write it anywhere.

Whatever the intention — and the record does not state one — the effect of this structure is visible on the face of the documents. A removal recommendation that appears in writing nowhere carries no signature. On paper, the committee counseled moderation; the maximum penalty became the act of the full Board — a board whose majority for it, as Section IV shows, did not exist without the committee’s own votes. The result is a “laundered removal” — a removal that, on the record, was recommended by no one and carried out by everyone.

Take the two contradictions together, and the design of the Bylaws explains why they matter. Bylaw 2, Section 4G permits removal only upon a two-thirds vote of the entire Grand Board — ten votes of fourteen. The framers set the threshold there for situations exactly like this one: where the chair, the treasury, the minutes, and the investigation rest in a few hands, the supermajority of the whole body is the membership’s protection against a small group converting its own conclusion into everyone’s act. On April 9 that protection was not a formality. It was the last safeguard standing — and the Pennsylvania court’s preliminary findings conclude that the elected officer is likely to prevail on his claim that eight votes did not satisfy it.

Why it was arranged this way is a question the record does not answer, and this page will not answer it for the record. We note only what the documents show: a penalty whose recommendation no one would sign, a theory with no documentation, a written dissent left uncounted, and a recording still withheld. Decisions that are based on credible evidence and sound judgment do not arrange to be unsigned.

VII. Independent Review

The Special Committee’s report has also been examined, clause by clause, by three independent analytical platforms working separately from the same source material. Their conclusions were consistent with one another, and with the record summarized above: the allegations concern administrative judgment, not misconduct; the written recommendations stopped at censure; and the penalty imposed exceeded anything the investigation itself proposed. The comparative review is available in The Public Record, and the full analyses are available to any Archon upon request.

The record does not say why. It only says who — and now, how many.
The why is a question for the body the record belongs to.

The Public Record — documentation, in one place, for any Archon who wishes to see it.

douglasslegacypress.com  •  Sources: April 9, 2025 Executive Session Minutes (court-submitted exhibit); Special Committee written materials; comparative independent analyses.

Litigation status: in the Pennsylvania proceeding, the Orphans’ Court has issued preliminary findings — addressing the procedural validity of the April 9 removal vote under the Bylaws — that the elected officer is likely to prevail on the merits; final resolution remains pending. The minutes quoted on this page were filed with the court as an exhibit by the Fraternity itself.