Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!agate!labrea!rutgers!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!terminus!nyssa
From: nyssa@terminus.UUCP (The Prime Minister)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Suggestions for a new backbone
Message-ID: <12309@terminus.UUCP>
Date: 28 Oct 88 12:23:06 GMT
Article-I.D.: terminus.12309
References: <5178@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <8187@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US> <895@ncar.ucar.edu> <8280@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US>
Reply-To: nyssa@terminus.UUCP (The Prime Minister)
Organization: Terminus
Lines: 23

I don't really want to get into this firefight, but I felt that John F.
Haugh II made a mistake here which needs a little bit of correction...

In article <8280@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US> jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US (The Beach Bum) writes:
>At that point, you, as a member of the backbone *DON'T* have an opinion.
>You have an obligation to perform your responsibility.  Come November 8th
>when the voters in this country elect an electoral college to select the
>president, the members of that college will not have as an option doing
>something other than performing their responsibility.

The people selected as electors to the electoral college are in no way
bound to vote for any candidate.  History is "littered" with instances
when an elector voted against his previously expressed preference, the
most recent being in 1976, when Ronald Reagan got a vote from an
elector from Washington state.

Perhaps the comparison you were looking for was that of a delegate to
the national convention?

BTW- I disagree with this view; if the then backbone didn't have the
right to express their own discretion, then finding backbone sites
would have been very difficult.
-- 
James C. Armstrong, Jr		nyssa@terminus.UUCP