Beginning in , all presidential elections have been conducted under the stipulations of the Twelfth Amendment. Since then, only in the tumultuous election has the House of Representatives been required to hold a contingent election to choose the president. Crawford, and Henry Clay —won an absolute majority of electoral votes, the decision was left to the House under the Twelfth Amendment.
As the winner of both the popular vote and the most electoral votes, Andrew Jackson expected the House to vote for him. Instead, the House elected John Quincy Adams on its first ballot. In March , just weeks after the election of had been resolved, the state legislature of New York proposed two constitutional amendments similar to what would become the 12th Amendment.
While the amendments eventually failed in the New York legislature, U. On December 9, , the 8th Congress approved the 12th Amendment and three days later submitted it to the states for ratification. Since there were seventeen states in the Union at the time, thirteen were needed for ratification. By September 25, , fourteen states had ratified it and James Madison declared that the 12th Amendment had become a part of the Constitution.
The states of Delaware, Connecticut, and Massachusetts rejected the amendment, although Massachusetts would eventually ratify it years later, in The presidential election of and all elections since have been conducted according to the provisions of the 12th Amendment. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content.
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In addition to its implicit recognition of the existence of political parties, the Amendment made another important change: The original Constitution provided that the failure of any candidate to achieve a majority would require the House to choose as president one of the five top-ranking candidates, with the person coming in second to serve as vice-president unless there was tie for second place, in which case the Senate would choose between them.
Now, however, the House would choose only the President from the top three choices of the electors; the Senate would now choose the Vice President from the top two choices of the electors for that specific office. Among other things, this guaranteed, in effect, that there would always be a vice president, who could presumably take the reins of the presidency should the House be hopelessly divided among the top three candidates for the presidency.
This aspect of the Twelfth Amendment became crucial in , the only time since that the House in fact selected the president as the result of the inability of any of the presidential candidates to achieve a majority of electoral votes. Under the original Constitution, the House would have been able to choose among all four, and one might plausibly believe that Clay might have prevailed.
Under the Twelfth Amendment, however, Clay was out of the running, and the choice was reduced to Jackson, Adams, and Crawford. Although no election since has been decided in the House of Representatives, a shift of relatively few votes in a small number of key states might well have led to that result in , , and What this means, practically speaking, is that in contemporary America, Wyoming, the smallest state with under , people, would have the same say in choosing a new president as California, with a population nearly 70 times that of Wyoming.
Because of the potential disconnect between the popular vote and the result of the electoral vote or potential vote in the House , there have been recurrent proposals simply to elect the president by popular vote.
Political scientists have determined that voters rarely cast their vote on the basis of the vice presidential candidate. That is, just as in many states candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run entirely separate campaigns, meaning that sometimes the governor is from one party and the lieutenant governor from another, one could imagine separate elections for the president and vice president.
Even within the electoral college, we could imagine voting for two slates of electors, one charged with choosing the president, the other picking the vice president. Most of the time, of course, voters would pick the slates of the same political party. That very possibility might serve to discipline presidential candidates more than is now the case, especially because candidates who win the presidential nomination today basically exercise unlimited discretion in choosing their running mates.
This was not the case before the 20th century, when political conventions often exercised real choice in picking both candidates. In any event, the Twelfth Amendment, though probably unknown to most Americans, has not only a fascinating history but, much more importantly, has the capacity to play a key role should we ever become a multi-party system as was the case in and in which enough candidates get electoral votes to deprive anyone of a majority and thus force election by the House.
Among other possibilities explored in the last five minutes as the final show concluded, was that her vice-presidential running mate who could be chosen by the Senate might in fact end up as President should the House be unable to decide between the two somewhat unpopular and flawed presidential candidates!
That would have allowed the House to choose among the top three.
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