Predictably enough, the system soon broke down: in 1800, the fourth presidential election, two candidates, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, each received 73 electoral college votes. Originally, the candidate receiving the most electoral college votes would be President, the runner-up Vice President, a bizarre arrangement to modern eyes, as it was highly likely to lead to bitter political opponents having to work together at the head of the Executive branch – imagine George W Bush with Al Gore or John Kerry as his Vice President, or Kennedy with Nixon as his deputy in 1961. Electors therefore had to look outside their own state for at least one of their choices and consider a candidate with some national standing. So they created the office of Vice President and required that electors vote for two candidates, ‘of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves’. Concerned that loyalty to an individual state was stronger than to the new federation, the authors of the constitution feared that individual electors might be inclined to choose a leader from their own state. They established an elaborate mechanism for electing the President: each state would choose members of the electoral college who were mandated to vote for the candidate who had received most votes in their state. The founding fathers who wrote the United States Constitution created the office of Vice President almost by accident. ![]() Poster for the Lincoln and Johnson ticket by Currier and Ives, 1864.
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