Twelfth Amendment (1804)

Amendment that refined the way in which electors vote for the president and vice president. Paragraphs 2 through 4 of Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution, which created the electoral college method of choosing the president and vice president, were among the least controversial provisions of the Constitution, both during the late stages of the Constitutional Convention and in the state ratification debates that followed. “The mode of appointment of the Chief Magistrate of the United States,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 68, “is almost the only part of the system of any consequence, which has escaped without severe censure, or which has received the slightest mark of approbation from its opponents.” It is all the more ironic, then, that the electoral college was the first institution of the new government to undergo a major constitutional overhaul.

The main effect of the Twelfth Amendment was to change a system in which electors cast two votes for president, with the candidate receiving the largest majority elected as president and the second-place finisher elected as vice president, to a system in which the electors were charged to vote separately for president and vice president, with a majority of electoral votes required to win each office.

The Twelfth Amendment also reduced from the five highest electoral vote recipients to the three highest the pool of candidates from which the House would elect the president in the event that no candidate received a majority of electoral votes for president. Authority to select a vice president in the event of an electoral college failure was lodged exclusively in the Senate, not partially, as in the original Constitution. The amendment empowered the Senate to choose from the two highest electoral vote recipients for vice president, with a majority vote of the entire membership of the Senate required for election. The Constitution's age, residency, and citizenship requirements for president were extended to the vice president. Finally, the amendment stated that if a vice president, but no president, is chosen by the March 4 following the election, “the Vice President shall act as President as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.”