CONSTITUTION 101
Module 15: The Constitution as Amended:
Article V and a Walking Tour of America’s 27 Constitutional Amendments
15.3 Info Brief
The Chisholm decision proved quite controversial, and the 11th Amendment was proposed and
ratified shortly thereafter—as a way of reversing the Supreme Court’s decision. (It was ratified in
less than a year.)
THE 12TH AMENDMENT
Following the Election of 1800, the American people ratified the 12th Amendment, altering the
Electoral College and addressing problems that emerged in some of our nation’s earliest
presidential elections.
Under the original Constitution, electors cast ballots not for one presidential candidate, but for
two of them, with the second-place finisher becoming the vice president.
The framers didn’t expect that there would be national parties that nominated candidates (and
offered their own tickets for president and vice president). However, political parties quickly
emerged, and the strange two-vote system led almost immediately to a serious political crisis.
In 1796, Vice President Adams faced off against former Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.
Even as early as 1796, political parties had already begun to emerge. And Adams (a Federalist)
and Jefferson (a Democratic-Republican) were already associated with opposing political
parties. In the end, Adams won 71 electoral votes to Thomas Jefferson’s 69. But the electors’
second votes were scattered.
As a result, none of the Federalist candidates for vice president received more total votes than
Jefferson, so he became Adams’s—his opponent’s—vice president.
Adams and Jefferson squared off again in the Election of 1800, but this time Jefferson defeated
Adams by a vote of 73 to 65 in the Electoral College. This election marked the arrival of the two-
party system and was a bitterly contested election.
Even as Jefferson outpaced Adams in the Electoral College, he actually tied his fellow party
member—and nominal running mate—Aaron Burr 73 to 73 in the Electoral College. Even
though everyone knew that Jefferson was really at the top of the ticket, Burr tried to game the
system and refused to stand aside. Under the Constitution, this threw the process into the U.S.
House of Representatives.
The resulting House process took place in the lame-duck, Federalist-controlled Congress—the
one that the voters just voted out of office.
It lasted for six days and 36 ballots before the House chose Jefferson.
In the end, the Federalists—including key party members outside of Congress like Alexander
Hamilton—concluded that Jefferson was the lesser of two evils, and Jefferson was peacefully
inaugurated—setting an important precedent for the peaceful transfer of power in early America.