Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution

In cases where multiple candidates tied for the second-most votes, the Senate would hold a contingent election to select the vice president.

A candidate was required to receive an absolute majority, more than half of the total number of states, in order to be chosen as president.

A candidate was required to receive an absolute majority, more than half of the total Senate membership, in order to be chosen as vice president.

George Washington's decision not to seek a third term and the emergence of partisan political activity exposed problems with the original procedure.

[citation needed] In the 1796 election, John Adams, the Federalist Party presidential candidate, received votes from a majority of electors.

[4] This prolonged contingent election, combined with the increasing Democratic–Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate, set the stage for a constitutional amendment to alter this flawed system.

Shortly thereafter, Clinton won a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate, where he was instrumental in bringing the designation amendment to Congress.

The Democratic-Republicans wanted to decide on the amendment quickly, but the Federalists argued that the ideas needed more time than the current session allowed.

The 8th Congress would allow the Democratic–Republicans a better chance of meeting the two-thirds vote requirement for submitting a proposed Constitutional amendment.

[6] The original proposal starting in the New York State Legislature would have, along with designation, put forward the idea of the district election of electors that Treasury Secretary Gallatin had supported.

[7] The committee then submitted an updated version of the designation amendment to the House on October 23 that changed the number of candidates in a contingency election from five to three and allowed the Senate to choose the vice president if there were a tie in that race.

Small Federalist states disliked the change from five to three because it made it far less likely that a small-state candidate would make it to a contingency election.

Designation, argued Griswold and Huger, would violate the spirit of the Constitution by taking away a check on the power of the large states.

[5] Next up for the Federalists was Seth Hastings of Massachusetts, who submitted the argument that the designation amendment rendered the vice presidency useless and advocated the elimination of the three-fifths clause.

Federalist Jonathan Dayton proposed that the office of the vice president should be eliminated and his colleague, Uriah Tracy, seconded it.

On the other side, Wilson Cary Nicholas was simply worried that Congress would not submit the amendment in time for the states to ratify it before the 1804 election.

Senator Pierce Butler of South Carolina argued that the issues with the election of 1800 were unlikely to happen again and he would not advocate changing the Constitution simply to stop a Federalist vice president.

John Quincy Adams argued that the change from five to three gave an advantage to the people that violated the federative principle of the Constitution.

Senator Samuel White of Delaware claimed that the original procedure had not been given "a fair experiment" and criticized the proposed amendment for entrenching the two-party system which had taken over presidential elections.

Also, designation itself would drastically cut down the number of elections that would reach the House of Representatives, and the president is then much more likely to be the people's choice.

William Cocke of Tennessee took a different approach when he argued that the entire small state argument of the Federalists was simply out of self-interest.

Most notably, Uriah Tracy of Connecticut argued in a similar vein as Adams when he invoked the federative principle of the Constitution.

The Twelfth Amendment requires the House to choose from the three highest receivers of electoral votes, compared to five under the original procedure.

Adams subsequently appointed Clay as his Secretary of State, to which Jackson and his supporters responded by accusing the pair of making a "corrupt bargain".

Ultimately Van Buren won the electoral college outright and the attempt to invoke the 12th Amendment proved fruitless.

Party alignments by state in the House of Representatives suggest that any contingent election would have had an uncertain outcome, with none of the candidates (Van Buren, William Henry Harrison and Hugh White) having a clear path to victory.

[citation needed] In that same election, no candidate for vice president secured an electoral majority as the Democratic electors from Virginia refused to vote for Democratic vice presidential nominee, Richard Mentor Johnson, due to his relationship with a former slave, and instead cast their votes for William Smith.

However, Cheney and his wife had moved to Dallas five years earlier when he assumed the role of chief executive at Halliburton.

Cheney had grown up in Wyoming, had represented it in Congress and had continuously maintained a residence[37] in the state during his tenure at Halliburton.

A few months before the election, he switched his voter registration and driver's license to Wyoming and put his home in Dallas up for sale.