Twelfth Amendment

Twelfth Amendment, The Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1804.NARAamendment (1804) to the Constitution of the United States repealing and revising presidential election procedures.

The catalyst for the Twelfth Amendment was the U.S. presidential election of 1800. Under the original text of the Constitution, political participation was at first reserved for the American elite. Only landowning white males could run for office and vote, and the voting privilege itself was restricted in presidential elections to elite slates of electors who would effectively choose the country’s president and vice president. The Framers had viewed political parties with suspicion, but by the 1790s party politics had taken root—and with it the interests of party organizations began to exert influence. In 1796 the Federalist Party supported John Adams for president, but it split its vote such that the Democratic-Republican candidate, Thomas Jefferson, earned the second greatest number of votes, thereby securing the post of vice president. To forestall this situation from occurring again, the parties sought to ensure that all its electors were united. In 1800 this produced an electoral college tie between Jefferson, the Democratic-Republican candidate for president, and Aaron Burr, the party’s vice presidential candidate. Under the rules, the electors voted for two candidates without specifying who should hold which office. The election ultimately went to the House of Representatives, which elected Jefferson.

These elections revealed both a growing influence of political parties and a serious deficiency in the presidential election process. The effect of the Twelfth Amendment was to require separate votes for presidential and vice presidential candidates. Should an election result in a tie, the House of Representatives would chose for whom to cast votes, on the basis of a one-vote-per-state formulation, from among the top three electoral vote recipients. The Twelfth Amendment came into effect with the 1804 election.

The full text of the amendment is:


* The part included in brackets has been superseded by Section 3 of the Twentieth Amendment.