The Twelfth Amendment gets no respect.
Indeed, most constitutional law scholars
would have a difficult time explaining
what it does and why it was needed in the first place.
But I want to tell you how a flaw
in the Constitution resulted
in two disastrous presidential elections,
and how the Twelfth Amendment solved a technical defect
in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution.
The text of Article II, Section 1 states
that members of the electoral college
shall meet in their respective states
and vote by ballot for two persons.
In other words, under the original Constitution,
there was not a separate vote
for president and vice president.
Instead, each elector voted for two persons,
and the person with the majority of votes would be president
and the runner-up would be vice president.
However, if there was a tie between two candidates obtaining
a majority vote, the election would be decided
in the House of Representatives,
with each state delegation having one vote.
So each state, not each member of Congress,
but each state got one vote in the House
to break the tie for president.
The Founders didn't anticipate the development
of political parties,
and that caused a bit of a disaster
in the 1796 and 1800 presidential elections.
In 1796, the Federalist candidate, John Adams,
came in first and was elected president.
His running mate was Thomas Pinckney,
the former governor of South Carolina.
When the electoral college cast their votes, however,
too many Federalist electors withheld their second vote
from Pinckney to make sure that he didn't tie with Adams,
and that led to the Democratic Republican candidate,
Thomas Jefferson, becoming Adams' vice president
instead of Pinckney.
And then in 1800, Jefferson and Burr both ran
as Democratic Republicans with the expectation
that Jefferson would be the president
and Burr would be his vice president.
For this to work, the Democratic Republican electors needed
to cast the first of their two electoral votes
for Jefferson. Then, to prevent a tie,
one elector needed to withhold his second vote for Burr.
However, no one remembered to withhold
that second vote for Burr,
and the result was a tie between Jefferson and Burr
in the electoral college.
The election then went to the House of Representatives
where it took six days and 36 ballots
before Jefferson was elected president
and Burr vice president.
Article II, Section 1 had created a trap for the unwary,
and it was so disastrous that I think the nation
had no choice but to amend the Constitution
to avoid that problem ever happening again.
Shortly after the catastrophic election of 1800,
the Twelfth Amendment was proposed by Congress
and ratified by the states.
The Twelfth Amendment fixes both the Adams-Jefferson problem
and the Jefferson-Burr problem
by requiring separate votes
for president and vice president.
The Twelfth Amendment does that by saying that each presidential elector
will cast not votes for two persons,
but will cast two ballots:
one ballot for the presidency,
one ballot for the vice presidency.
Whoever wins the presidential ballot is president.
Whoever wins the vice presidential ballot is vice president.
Though everyone agreed
that there was a problem with Article II, Section 1,
there were still a few who opposed the passage
of the Twelfth Amendment,
such as Gouverneur Morris of New York,
who argued that electors should recognize
the importance of giving both votes
to men fit for the first office.
Hamilton, however, demolished this argument
with a single sentence, retorting "One such fact
as the late election [of 1800] is worth a thousand theories."
The Twelfth Amendment isn't very controversial,
but it did have a significant effect
on the presidential election process.
By correcting the technical defect
of Article II, Section 1,
it has ensured that the disastrous elections
of 1796 and 1800 have never seen an encore performance.