only people to cast ballots for president (with each state to determine how its electors would be selected). Each elector would cast two votes for president. The person receiving a majority of the electoral votes would become president; the runner-up would become vice president. Why not? A next-in-command is needed in case the president dies or otherwise leaves office, and who better than the person the voters hold in second-highest esteem?
To be sure, such a system would make no sense today. In 2016, it could have resulted in President Trump and Vice President Clinton, a rather infelicitous partnership. But at the nation’s creation, electors were not deciding between candidates from different parties after a competitive election. In fact, there were no candidates, no parties, and no competition. No one ran for president or even declared interest. The electors were simply expected to decide who would be the best man for the job. The second best person—the one receiving the second-highest number of votes—would become vice president. In the event no one received a majority of the electoral votes, the House of Representatives would choose the president.
This system worked reasonably well for the nation’s first two elections. In 1788, the sixty-nine electors unanimously voted in George Washington; thirty-four of the sixty-nine tapped John Adams with their other vote, easily surpassing the total (nine) of the third-place finisher, John Jay. It had always been assumed that the first president would be Washington, the Revolutionary War hero who presided over the Constitutional Convention. To no one’s surprise, the second slot fell to Adams, the most important nonmilitary figure in the American Revolution. With the notable exception of the prickly Adams himself, who expressed bitterness that so many electors declined to support him, virtually everyone approved the result. The nation thus began with President Washington and Vice President Adams, a talented and public-spirited duo. They were re-elected in 1792, Washington again unanimously and Adams this time receiving the votes of seventy-seven of the 132 electors.
The broadly approved outcome of the first two elections masked two potential problems. First, what if all the electors had cast one ballot each for Washington and Adams? Under that plausible scenario, there would have been a tie for the presidency, throwing the election to the House. Foreseeing this possibility—or, worse, a few quirky electors omitting Washington, and Adams ending up president—Alexander Hamilton lobbied some electors not to vote for Adams, so as to ensure Washington’s election to the top spot. But apart from Hamilton, who privately noted this “defect in the Constitution,”2 few worried about a tie, perhaps because such an occurrence would have been easily resolved: The House would have elected Washington president and Adams vice president. Not even Adams would have expected otherwise or protested the result.
So too, no one raised the risk of a second troubling scenario: What if the men to finish first and second were adversaries, leaving the president saddled with an antagonistic “partner” in office? (Adams was actually the rare Founder not enamored of Washington, but for the most part he kept his misgivings to himself.) But this problem, too, seems magnified through the prism of political parties. Absent such parties, the antagonism between president and vice president would be personal only, a circumstance that could be transcended through maturity and good will.
Thus, if the original method of selecting the president and vice president created the seeds of crisis because of a potential tie or a schizophrenic “team,” neither problem seemed likely to arise. But both would before long.
By the time Washington stepped down after two terms, political parties were clearly established. Adams and Hamilton led the incumbent party, the Federalists; Thomas Jefferson and James Madison led the opposition, the Democratic-Republicans (or Republicans for short). The bitter divide between these parties produced the first contested presidential election, in 1796. While it remained the case that no one formally declared their candidacy or campaigned openly, everyone understood Adams and Jefferson to be the respective choices of the Federalists and Republicans. South Carolina’s Thomas Pinckney served as Adams’s de facto running mate, while Aaron Burr was Jefferson’s. Such designations were unofficial, and the voting mechanism remained the same: each elector would cast two votes for president (none for vice president) and the second-place finisher would become vice president.
Adams prevailed in a tight election, receiving seventy-one electoral votes to Jefferson’s sixty-eight. Some scheming produced ticket-splitting, such that Pinckney received only fifty-nine votes and Burr just thirty. The result was that, while Adams won the presidency, Jefferson, rather than Adams’s running mate Pinckney, was elected vice president. The Adams-Jefferson administration consisted of a president and vice president from different parties. And though they had been co-revolutionaries and close friends, Adams and Jefferson differed markedly in their political philosophies. Indeed, ten months prior to the election, in a letter to his wife, Abigail, Adams prophesied that he and Jefferson as president/vice president (in either order) would produce a “dangerous crisis in public affairs” because the two were in “opposite boxes.”3
For the first time, the Constitution’s mechanism for electing the president and vice president had proven problematic, producing an administration potentially at war with itself. “The Lion & the Lamb are to lie down together,” observed Hamilton, who detested both lion and lamb (Adams and Jefferson). “Sceptics like me quietly look forward to the event—willing to hope but not prepared to believe.”4
Some Federalists were more pessimistic and looked to prevent a recurrence of the lion/lamb problem that resulted from electors voting only for president. They proposed constitutional amendments that would require electors to vote separately for president and vice president, which would actually make it easier to elect a united administration. The proposals went nowhere, but the concern that triggered them proved justified: Over the next four years, Vice President Jefferson opposed (with various degrees of openness) many of the policies of President Adams.5
The resistance of his own vice president proved a headache for Adams, but not an existential threat to the nation. The Adams-Jefferson intra-administration discord paled in comparison to the crisis created by the next presidential election, in 1800. In that rematch between Adams and Jefferson, the Constitution’s flawed process produced the other potentially catastrophic scenario that the framers had inadvertently made likely: a tie. Not a tie between the parties’ respective presidential candidates, but rather a tie between one of them (Jefferson) and his running mate (Burr).
As in 1796, it was understood that Jefferson was the presidential candidate and Burr his junior partner, but there remained no mechanism for electors to distinguish between their two choices. Rather, as before, they cast two votes for president (and none for vice president). In 1796, many Republican electors had voted for Jefferson but not Burr. That changed in 1800, because Republicans learned from the Federalists’ mistake. Recall that in 1796 twelve Federalist electors did not use their second vote on Adams’s running mate Pinckney, allowing Jefferson to sneak in to the vice presidency. In 1800, every Republican elector cast one vote for Jefferson and one for Burr, giving them seventy-three electoral votes each. Adams received sixty-five, and his unofficial running mate, Charles Pinckney (cousin of his previous running mate, Thomas), sixty-four. One Federalist elector was smart enough to vote for someone other than Pinckney and thus avert a tie in the event the Federalists won. There was talk of a few Republican electors doing the same. However, because of concern that too many electors would do so, thereby allowing Adams to secure the second spot, none did. Republicans over-learned the lesson of 1796. Professor Akhil Amar succinctly captures the result: “Even though almost all Republicans electors had in their minds voted for Jefferson first and Burr second, on the formal paper ballots these two candidates emerged as equals.”6
Recall our speculation that a tie between Washington and Adams would have been unproblematic: The House of Representatives would have elected Washington president without much fuss. Ideally, the Jefferson-Burr tie would have produced a similarly uncontroversial result. After all, no one doubted that Jefferson was the top of the ticket, the man the Republican electors wished to make president.
