Issue #921 The Choice, Friday, September 5, 2025
Every Friday until the end of 2025, we will publish a post about each of the 27 Amendments to the Constitution.
The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, changed the presidential election process by requiring electors to cast separate ballots for president and vice president, rather than two votes for president as in the original Constitution. This amendment, a response to the 1800 election tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, ensures the president and vice president run on a single ticket and prevents situations where the vice president could be from a rival political party.
Congress therefore passed the 12th Amendment, mandating separate votes for President and Vice President in the Electoral College, thereby averting future electoral deadlocks.
The 12th Amendment established separate votes for president and vice president in the Electoral College, thus preventing ties between candidates from the same party and ensuring clearer outcomes. The candidates for president and vice president must be from different states, and also hopefully from different regions of the United States.
The Electoral College was established by the United States Constitution for the indirect election of the president and vice president of the United States. This system was implemented to balance the influence of populous and less populous states in presidential elections and to ensure a degree of separation between the direct will of the populace and the selection of the national executive leaders.
The Electoral College was also implemented to ensure that Southern states that had a large population of enslaved people could not have more influence than Northern states.
The creation of the Electoral College was a compromise between those who favored direct popular election of the president and those who preferred election by Congress. This hybrid system was seen as a way to satisfy both sides, ensuring the president was accountable to the people but insulated from popular whims.
By requiring candidates to win electoral votes across a variety of states, the Electoral College encourages presidential candidates to run national campaigns, rather than focusing solely on high-population areas. However, presidential candidates still spend most of their time campaigning in states with a high number of electors, still virtually ignoring the smaller states.
If neither a presidential candidate nor a vice presidential candidate secures a majority of electoral votes, the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlines the process for selecting the president and vice president:
Presidential Tie-Breaker:
If no candidate receives a majority of the electoral votes for President, the House of Representatives chooses the President from the top three vote-getters, with each state delegation receiving one vote.
Vice Presidential Tie-Breaker:
If no candidate receives a majority of the votes for Vice President, the Senate chooses the Vice President from the two highest vote-getters.
These procedures ensure that both the president and vice president can still be elected even if the Electoral College does not produce a majority for either position.
This is another reason why voting for House and Senate representatives is so important. The new Congress after the November election starts on January 3, and the Electoral votes are counted on January 6, so if there is an electoral college tie, the “new” House and Senate vote to break the tie(s).
Today, as Trump and the Republicans are doing everything they can to rig the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election, it is important to remember that the Constitution is the law of the land, and that Trump swore to uphold the Constitution. He is obviously not doing that, trying to get around the laws that say that the states run elections, not the Federal government or the Executive Branch.
Our Choice:
We must be vigilant about watching and deterring everything Trump and the Republicans are trying to do to usurp the Constitution and the Legislative and Judicial branches of our government.
We must do everything in our power to win back majorities in both houses of Congress, hopefully, large majorities, so that we can then hamstring Trump (and J.D. Vance if he becomes president) from 2027 through 2029.
That includes impeaching everyone, including Supreme Court Justices, who are breaking their sworn oaths of office.
Have you ever considered how the 12th Amendment applies to you?
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