Vice President

The vice president is the electoral twin of the president. Paired on the same ticket, both must meet the same few constitutional requirements: be at least thirty-five in age, a natural-born U.S. citizen, and have lived in the United States for the previous fourteen years.

Those qualifications, spelled out in Article II, section 1, clause 5, of the Constitution, were originally intended for presidents and did not mention vice presidents. The framers stipulated that the vice president would be the runner-up in the presidential contest and therefore would have the necessary qualifications to hold either office. For the first three elections, the electoral college worked as planned, with each elector casting two votes for president and the second-highest vote getter becoming vice president.

But in the fourth presidential election, 1800, the system backfired. Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, running together against other candidates, drew the same number of electoral votes. The tie threw the election to the House of Representatives, which chose Jefferson. Burr became his vice president.

By the time of the fifth election, 1804, Congress and the states had adopted the Twelfth Amendment, which required separate ballots for president and vice president, with electors casting only one vote for each office. That procedure is in effect today.

Under this system, it is possible for the president and vice president to receive different electoral vote totals, even though as a pair they received the same popular vote. There have been nine instances of faithless electors who refused to give their vote to the candidate who won their state. The most recent instance in which this affected a vice president was in 1988, when West Virginia elector Margaret Leach voted for the defeated Democratic candidates in reverse order. Instead of each receiving 112 electoral votes nationally, Michael Dukakis wound up with 111 for president and 1 for vice president, and his running mate, Lloyd Bentsen, received the reverse.

If no vice-presidential candidate receives a majority of electoral votes, the Senate elects the vice president under terms of the Twelfth Amendment. The choice is limited to the two contenders who received the most electoral votes. Two-thirds of the Senate must be present for the vote, but a simple majority of the total Senate membership is enough for election.

The Senate has chosen a vice president only once, in 1837, when Martin Van Buren's running mate, Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, received only 147 electoral votes—one fewer than a majority. Twenty-three Virginia electors who supported Van Buren, a Democrat, boycotted Johnson because he was known to have kept a succession of black mistresses. The remaining electoral votes were split among three candidates, with Francis Granger, a Whig from New York, having the next highest total. Required to choose between Johnson and Granger, the Senate voted along party lines, electing Johnson on a 33–16 vote. If the Whigs had controlled the Senate, it is conceivable that the president would have been from one party, his vice president from another.

The Twelfth Amendment specified that the vice president must meet the same qualifications as the president. And by requiring the electors to vote for at least [Page p491]one candidate not from their own state, the amendment retained the Constitution's requirement that the president and vice president be from different states. In 2000 Twelfth Amendment issues were raised when Texas governor George W. Bush chose former Wyoming representative Richard B. Cheney as his running mate. Cheney was living in Texas at the time, but he changed his residency to Wyoming by registering to vote there shortly before being nominated for vice president. The question of his residency stirred a lawsuit by three Texas residents who tried to deny the Bush-Cheney ticket from getting Texas's 32 Electoral College votes, but a federal court agreed with Republicans that Cheney was a Wyoming resident.

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