[EM] Quick elimination of useless rules: my Meta-rules

[David Catchpole]

It's severe ignorance to put the US Civil War down completely to Lincoln's
election. The circumstances that led up to it- the growing fractiousness
of the Democrats, economic and legislative crises etc. had more to do with
who and what made up Congress and the State bodies. The circumstances may
have been different but I claim in my foreign ignorance that the war would
have been hard to avoid no matter who got elected in 1860.

And on the subject of the Yugoslav elections- boycott is stupid. The
timing of the deciding election has no effect on the start of the
presidential term (June next year?) and
the-major-opposition-candidate-whose-name-escapes-me is pretty much
assured to win the runoff as long as there's no funny stuff from the
Milosevic camp. It seems the "West's" constant accusations of funny stuff
in the first round have affected domestic politics in Yugoslavia- but only
to make the opposition more irrational and indirectly improve Milosevic's
chances of continuing as president.

On Mon, 2 Oct 2000 DEMOREP1 at aol.com wrote:

> 25.2 percent of the voters defacto elected the U.S. President and Vice 
> President (Clinton and Gore) in the 1996 election (in 25 States and D.C. with 
> 270 of 538 electoral votes in the so-called "Electoral College").
> 
> Divide the popular votes by the Electoral College votes and sort low to high. 
>  Accumulate the E.C. votes to get 270.
> 
> Clinton/Gore got pluralities in 6 more States (total 379 Electoral votes) and 
> 49.24 percent of the total popular votes in all 50 States/D.C.
> 
> Similar paragraph 1 indirect minority rule elections have happened since 1832 
> when many State legislatures permitted the actual voters elect the Electors 
> of the E.C.
> 
> Any U.S. President election may produce another 1860 type election (and a 
> following 1861-1865 type Civil War) notwithstanding the appearance of 
> stability in the U.S. government structure (depending on the extent of any 
> comments by a major party loser who gets a majority of the popular votes).
> 
> Note the current chaos in Yugoslavia regarding who got a majority in the 
> Yugoslavia election for President.
> 
> 

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"I only said we'd make it across"
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