When the electoral votes were counted in the US presidential election of 1800 – only the fourth election in the history of the young nation – there was a problem. Two candidates received exactly 73 electoral votes, producing the first and (to date) the only Electoral College tie in American history.
Fortunately, the Constitution has a contingency plan for tied elections, spelled out in Article II, Section 1: “[I]If there are more than one who have such a majority and have an equal number of votes, the House of Representatives will immediately vote on one of them for president.. “
If only it was easy. A bitterly divided House of Representatives found itself in a bind 36 times before finally choosing Thomas Jefferson as the winner of the 1800 election and in doing so exposed a host of issues with the Electoral College that could not be resolved only with a constitutional amendment.
Political parties threw an adjustable wrench into the electoral college
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The drafters of the Constitution hoped that political parties would not be necessary given the limited powers of the federal government, but presidential candidates began to merge into political factions in the 1796 election, the first after George Washington. Almost immediately, the existence of warring political parties created headaches for the electoral college system.
In the first four US presidential elections, each voter voted twice for the presidency. The candidate who won the majority of the electoral college’s votes was the president and the second was the vice president. In the 1796 election, John Adams won the presidency, but the second was Thomas Jefferson, Adams’ main political rival and now his vice president.
“It was one of the first indications that the electoral college created by the founders was not working as intended,” says Robert Alexander, professor of political science at Ohio Northern University and author of Representation and Electoral College.
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A tie between two candidates from the same political party
The 1800 tie election made an even stronger case that the constituency needed to be repaired. By 1800, two political parties, Federalists and Democratic Republicans, fully dominated voters, who pledged to vote for the party handpicked list of candidates.
The map shows the state votes in the US Presidential Election of 1800 broken down into votes for Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson, or “blank ballot.”
Provisional Archives / Getty Images
“[Candidates for president] worked like a ticket, ”says Alexander. “It created problems when voters promised Democratic Republicans to vote for each of the two people listed on the ticket. The result was a 73-73 draw between Thomas Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr, both Democratic Republicans.
Meanwhile, the federalist candidate, incumbent John Adams, received just 65 votes. According to the Constitution, an electoral tie goes to the House of Representatives, where each state casts a ballot to choose a winner from among the two tied candidates. So Adams was out of the race and Burr, Jefferson’s running mate, could have pulled out, but didn’t.
Federalists, who still held a majority in the Lame Duck Congress, were now in the awkward position of choosing a president from two enemy candidates. Federalist leaders like Alexander Hamilton hated Jefferson’s policies, but they were even more suspicious of the opportunist Burr.
Pennsylvania and Virginia began to mobilize their militias, wondering if the stalemate would spark a civil war. It took 36 consecutive tied votes in the House before Jefferson was chosen as president and disaster was narrowly averted.
READ MORE: What Was Alexander Hamilton’s Role In The Contentious Presidential Defeat Of Aaron Burr?
12th amendment: one vote for the president, one for the vice-president
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The election fiasco of 1800 showed how the current electoral college system was not equipped for party line voting. Just in time for the 1804 presidential election, Congress passed and states ratified the 12th Amendment, which now ordered voters to vote for the president and a second for the vice president.
“Even though the Electoral College was one of the most controversial institutions created by the authors – there have been over 700 attempts to modify or abolish it – only a few of these attempts have paid off, the 12th Amendment being the first of them, ”Alexander said. “It actually dramatically changed the practice of the Electoral College.”
In addition to creating separate ballots for the president and vice-president, the 12th Amendment also limited the scope of presidential candidates who could be voted on in a contingent election to the House of Representatives. The amendment states that if no candidate wins a majority of the electoral votes, the election is returned to the House, but only the first three voters get the vote.
Andrew Jackson loses election after ‘corrupt negotiation’
This seemingly innocuous provision of the 12th Amendment had serious ramifications in the presidential election of 1824, in which four candidates received substantial electoral votes, depriving Leader Andrew Jackson of the majority required to claim the presidency.
Because only the top three vote-winners made it through the House contingency election, the fourth, Henry Clay, was out of the race. But Clay, who was Speaker of the House at the time, allegedly used his influence to elect John Quincy Adams instead of Jackson.
When Jackson, who had also won the popular vote, learned that Adams had appointed Clay as his secretary of state, he fumed at what he saw as a brazenly “corrupt deal” to rob the White House.
“Jackson has the distinction of being the only presidential candidate to have received a plurality of votes in the electoral college and a plurality of the popular vote and has yet to come away with the presidency,” said Alexander.
