Okay, so, I'm trying to read that PDF, and I'm finding it a little hard to follow. Perhaps I've just not had enough caffeine yet today. It also might be a terminology issue.
For me, polyandry (as with polygamy and polygyny) means that the marriages are simultaneous. But the article makes reference to women leaving their husbands (it does not specify if divorce is happening, or legal separations, or what) to be with Smith, and that the leaving of a husband to be with another man who could better guarantee you entry to heaven is fine with Mormon doctrine. To me, if you have left one husband, and you then go on to marry someone else afterwards, that's not polyandry. But the article is kind of fuzzy on the timelines for these things, so I'm really not sure what to make of it.
The article is a very confusing description of a practice that is not really so confusing at all.
In Modern Mormonism, this practice is regarded as having been in error; basically part of the “growing pains” of a new church, trying to make sense of its beliefs and what to do about some of them.
We Mormons believe that marriage is intended to be, not just for this mortal life, but for all eternity.
It was widely thought, back then, that a woman could be assured a better place in the afterlife if she was married to a man who she was sure would achieve the highest level, instead of to a man who might fall short. So there were a number of women who married “for time only” to their proper husbands, but had themselves sealed to Joseph Smith or to other high leaders, on the assumption that in the afterlife, they would be married to these leaders, and would share the higher place in Heaven that they assumed these leaders would occupy, but that they didn't assume that their own husbands would achieve.
As I said, we now believe this practice to have been in error. It is my understanding that where this is known to have occurred, that the Temple work has since been done to seal these women to their proper husbands.
In any event, as with the previous “evidence” provided by Epepke, this doesn't actually support the claim that he says it does. If the practice described therein were to stand as valid, the effect would be that at death, the women in question were essentially divorced from their mortal husbands, and remarried to Joseph Smith or other church leaders. It is not an example of any woman having two marriages to two different men in effect at the same time.
I'm not going to take the position that the church never has, or never will allow anything that can honestly be described as “polyandry”, much less “group marriage”. But so far, Epepke, who made the claim, has twice provided “evidence” to support the claim, which, in fact, entirely failed to support it at all.
