The Twelfth Amendment of the US Constitution

Changing the Rules in Response to the Rise of Political Parties

Jul 31, 2009

George Washington was elected president unanimously twice. Those were the last two times for such national unity. The elections of 1796 and 1800 were vastly different.

The Founding Fathers were indeed men of great wisdom and vision, but alas, they were also human. In creating the Constitution they acknowledged this by providing for a difficult but achievableamendment process. This process was included for a number of reasons, among them to correct mistakes of vision. The Twelfth Amendment was needed to correct just such a mistake.

High Aspirations for the Electoral College

The Constitution created a scheme for electing the nation’s chief executive officer, the president. It was complex in a number of respects meeting the political needs of the day, but there was a high aspiration in creating the Electoral College to have the best individual chosen as the nation’s leader.

The assumption was that by creating a group of Electors solely charged with selecting the nation’s leader, these individuals could become informed regarding the various possibilities and make choices based upon the national good. This was before the rise of political parties in the country.

Article II Designed to Elect the Best President

The Constitution’s Article II, Section 1, clause 3 gave each Elector two votes for President. The Vice-President would be the one with the second most votes. The Framers thought the result would be the two best people selected as leaders of the country. While George Washington was available this worked fine.

Political Parties Develop Competing Visions

By the time Washington determined in 1796 that he would not run for a third term, competing visions for the country developed, and political associations coalesced around these visions. One vision was the Federalist vision of a strong central government embodied by Vice-President John Adams. The other was a more decentralized system centered on local and personal autonomy represented by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans. The result was political parties.

The Troubled Presidential Elections of 1796 and 1800

The Article II structure lead to problems in 1796, when John Adams, a Federalist, became president and the runner up, Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, became vice-president. In 1800, matters were even more confusing when Jefferson, the Democratic-Republican candidate for president, tied in the Electoral vote for president with his running mate, former Senator Aaron Burr.

The Article II provision for breaking ties was to send the matter to the House of Representatives. The House was controlled by the Federalists, who wanted neither Jefferson, nor Burr, and needed thirty-six votes from February 11 to February 17, 1801 to choose a president. The lofty ideal of learned citizens selecting the most qualified leaders was not working.

The Solution of the Twelfth Amendment

In the aftermath of the elections of 1796 and 1800, it became evident that the original system was unworkable given the development of political parties. The Twelfth Amendment was sent to the States by Congress on December 9, 1803 and became part of the Constitution with the thirteenth State ratification of New Hampshire on June 15, 1804. The Twelfth Amendment recognized political realities that the Framers did not foresee.

The Twelfth Amendment provided for Electors to cast separate votes for President and for Vice-President:

“The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, …”

This new provision would prevent the President and Vice-President being from competing parties as happened in 1797, or placing the Presidential candidate in competition with the Vice-Presidential candidate of the same party for the presidency as happened in 1801.

Twelfth Amendment Governs Elections from 1804 to the Present

All presidential elections since 1804 have been conducted under these provisions. The Twelfth Amendment corrected a flawed vision shared by the Framers, and acknowledged that political parties were part of the fabric of government despite the warnings given by George Washington in his Farewell Address.

The copyright of the article The Twelfth Amendment of the US Constitution in Law is owned by David J. Shestokas. Permission to republish The Twelfth Amendment of the US Constitution in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.