I think you are right. Josie and her pals expected to win. They know they would survive the non confidence vote because they were privy to the number of new members that supported them. It was revealed that Aware has now 3000 members, but there were only about 2100 votes in the end. Had the remaining 900 showed up (and I believe most of them would have supported Josie), the no confidence vote motion would have been defeated.
Of course, it begs the question why didn't these people turn up? My honest optimistic reply would be that these people actually sat and thought about it and decided it is morally wrong to support Josie and sully religion with secular affairs.
Here is what I heard. Ever since the AWARE takeover, their fellowship have been praying for the strength to see things through etc. I'm told that they did manage to rally very good support thru the network of churches. I suspect that's why they chose not to engage the old guard in a war of words thru the media. A mistake by the way!
They knew they had the numbers (same tactic as the AGM) and were confident of victory. Thio Su Mien was especially smug at the EGM. Things started to unravel because some people started to have a belated crisis of conscience triggered largely by the NCCS intervention plus all the negative media attention. It was beginning to look very uncool to be a "new aware" supporter.
If they had been more experienced activists, they would have plugged the pro homosexual label much harder and stayed on message. It could easily have gone the other way, bearing in my mind how conservative the average Singaporean really is.
That's my take on what happened
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