Vice-presidency

13 Pages 3225 Words

The founding fathers in requiring one vote for one office, suggests that they envisioned “not to secure a competent President of the Senate (only official VP duty), but (in Bouldinot’s phrase) ‘to obtain the second-best character in the onion to fill the place of the first, in case it should be vacated by an unforeseen accident.’”
It was inevitable that the defects of the above electoral design materialize into discord, as the electors began to partition the voting. They ignored the requisite that called for two indiscriminately votes and choose to pre-select which candidate they wanted to serve as President and VP, by giving their preference for either position a respective vote for that office. The outcome was a poltical debacle of sorts, in which two separate elections were breeding a disparate caliber of candidates, winners, and runner-ups. The result of which in 1776, a President (Adams) and VP (Jefferson) from opposing parties, created a constitutional crisis that would lead to the 12th amendment and election ...