On Nov. 7, 2026, VICC was scheduled to hold its monthly plenary session, which is held on the first Saturday of every month. It failed to reach a quorum of 8 delegates (it reached 7), so it was canceled. It was a surprising meeting cancellation for at least 7 reasons:

1. For the first time in the 23 months since it began meeting, it was supposed to release part of its proposed constitution; in this case, the section on rights.
   
2. Second, it had repeatedly referred to the Nov. 7 meeting at its USVI Senate hearing earlier in the month. It was supposed to release not only part of its proposed constitution but also its public-facing website after that meeting.
   
3. At the previous plenary session on Oct. 3, 2026, a drawn-out fight lasted hours over who would be elected VICC’s president.  The two leading candidates were Stedmann Hodge, the current acting president, and Imani Daniels.  One of the 15 USVI delegates was absent, and the vote was tied 7 to 7.  Rather than try to break the tie—for example, by putting a third candidate, notably Rudel Hodge, up for a vote—the body decided to postpone the election to the next plenary session on Nov. 7.
   
4. In the last 23 months, VICC has never missed a plenary session because it failed to reach a quorum.
   
5. Over the past month, VICC has held many secret committee meetings—I believe more than during any similar period in the preceding 23 months—so the plenary session was an opportunity to finally hold a public meeting, even if its agenda and discussion documents wouldn’t be made publicly available.
   
6. In the interim, two VICC delegates were elected to the USVI Senate. This raised the question of whether they had to, or should, resign from VICC, and when.  As a rule, plural office-holding among different branches of government is unconstitutional in U.S. subnational constitutions.  But courts have ruled inconsistently on whether that ban on holding multiple offices applies to delegates to subnational constitutional conventions. Some have ruled yes; others no.  In any case, there would probably be too little time to get a court ruling in the USVI; a court ruling could be expensive, and by then it might be so late in the VICC process that it would be seen as a waste of resources.
   
7. Waiting until Dec. 5 for the next plenary session could make some of VICC’s contentious issues, such as who would be elected president, vanish, since VICC’s committee meetings should essentially be over by then, and it will be only one month before one of the two delegates who won a seat in the Senate will be taking office in the Senate 

Given all these considerations, it struck me that the failure to reach a quorum might be strategic rather than inadvertent.  To analyze this issue, I thought it might help to know which delegates attended or didn’t show up.  For every other public meeting body I’ve studied, I would just look at the public meeting minutes to see the roll call, as open meeting government law typically requires a roll call for meeting minutes.  But VICC doesn’t publish its meeting minutes, even for its plenary sessions. So the public must beg and flatter VICC’s delegates to receive them, even when the information might still be politically salient. It’s part and parcel of VICC’s access politics, where access is meaningfully granted to members of the public, including reporters, who have demonstrated they won’t rock the boat. Such access politics—stemming from weak public right-to-know laws—is a major reason for so much corruption in the USVI.

It wasn’t clear to me what systemic interests among the delegates might lead them to want to cancel the Nov. 7 meeting. The most obvious explanation is one of the two voting factions at the Oct. 3 meeting, which is why I was interested in the roll-call vote.  Currently, I’m unable to test this hypothesis.

After the meeting, I learned that Delegate David Silverman was one of the seven delegates in attendance, so on Nov. 7 I wrote to him asking for the meeting roll call.  I chose him because he has made many public statements favoring VICC transparency. But Delegate Silverman hasn’t been willing to provide me with that or other information. One reason might be that, as other delegates have told me when I've made requests, he believes he is a lowly delegate and that higher-ups are responsible for providing such information, which is technically true. Another reason may be because he knows that it would anger other delegates if the delegates’ pact of secrecy were violated.

After Delegate Silverman didn’t reply to my request for roll-call votes, I wrote to Acting President Stedmann Hodge, who, as of this writing, more than 36 hours later, also hasn’t replied. Here is the email:

From: ‘J.H. Snider’
Sent: Sunday, November 8, 2026 10:35 PM
To: 'Stedmann Hodge'
Subject: Nov. 7 plenary session roll call

Dear President Hodge,

Please email me a copy of the roll call vote for VICC’s Nov. 7 plenary session, which did not reach a quorum.

Sincerely,

J.H. Snider, Editor
USVI Constitutional Convention Clearinghouse

If the Nov. 7 plenary session was strategically canceled, was the cancellation itself a bad outcome? It wasn’t good for public participation, but that must be balanced against the cost and awkwardness of the alternatives. Given this ambiguity about the goal of canceling the meeting, the question becomes: does the end justify the means? This post is already too long, and I won’t attempt to answer that question, but I’ll make two observations. First, it is sad when politicians don’t think it’s rational to reveal their true reasons for pursuing a particular outcome. Second, VICC’s mindset seems a lot like President Donald Trump’s: he thought the public cared only about results, so he could use whatever undemocratic procedures he wanted.

Here is the big picture: Let’s hope the proposed constitution that VICC was supposed to partially publicly reveal on Nov. 7, 2026 (and must submit to the Governor by Feb. 27, 2027) is so good that it justifies all the anti-democratic procedures and hypocritical promises of transparency and public participation that VICC's delegates employed while drafting it and before its public release.