Here's a riddle: When is a vote of 15 in favour of a faster pace of democratic development, 14 against and no abstentions not a majority in favour? Answer: When there are 30 members present, of course.
Read the foregoing again carefully and add up the numbers. Use a calculator if you like.
Don't worry, you are not alone. Even directly elected Frontiersman Lee Cheuk-yan failed to grasp exactly what had happened and made a bit of a wally of himself demanding to know how 15 to 14 in favour meant the vote was 'negatived'.
Your mathematics (and his) are perfectly right. Your logic is right too. But, unlike Mr Lee, you do not have all the facts at your disposal. The missing link, so to speak, is Rita Fan.
It's a bit sad, really, that we have to spend our time explaining all this when we should be talking about the glories or horrors (depending on your party) of democracy, universal suffrage and a directly-elected chief executive.
More frightening still: we will probably have to write about it again every week from now on, or readers will be querying our conclusions. But that, we suspect, was the purpose of the exercise.
Newspapers will be so busy explaining how perfectly straightforward votes for peace, motherhood and apple pie . . . sorry, mango pudding, turn out to have been votes for loansharking and wife-beating, that the relative merits of motherhood and wife-beating will never again be examined.