One of our constitution’s features is the ability to amend it. The 12th Amendment was ratified in 1804, less than 20 years after the Constitution itself.
The 12th Amendment was a response to the crazy presidential election of 1800. Voters in presidential elections then, and now, vote to elect members of the electoral college, and it is these electors who then really choose the president. But originally, the U.S. Constitution provided that each of these members of the “electoral college,” would cast not one vote for president and one vote for vice president, but two votes for president. Then the top vote-getter was elected president, and the second-place finisher became vice-president.
In the 1800 campaign, Federalist John Adams faced the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson. Adams’s Federalist running mate was Charles Pinckney, while Jefferson chose Aaron Burr as his running mate. One Federalist elector from Rhode Island, acting under instructions from the Adams campaign, voted for Adams and John Jay instead of Adams and Pinckney so that Adams finished one vote ahead of Pinkney. However, the Republicans got even more votes, and either through garbled instructions or downright scheming by the ambitious Burr, all 73 Republican electors voted for Jefferson and voted for Burr. That made the two of them tied for the office of president. Under the Constitution, with a tie in the electoral college, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, where lots of scheming and 36 ballots eventually resulted in Jefferson defeating Burr, whom he thought was his running mate to begin with.
The whole process was so scandalous that only four years later, enough state legislatures had adopted the Twelfth Amendment to change the electoral college to require each elector to cast not two votes for president, but one vote for president and one for vice president. There would be no more opportunities for a man like Burr to exploit that particular glitch in the original system.
"The History of Our Freedoms" is produced by KEDT-FM in Corpus Christi. Dr. Bill Chriss is a historian and legal scholar. For more on history and the constitution, check out his blog at https://drbillchriss.substack.com/.
