Electoral College Under The Twelfth Amendment
The Twelfth Amendment changed the process whereby a President and a Vice President are elected. It did not change the composition of the Electoral College. It has applied to Presidential elections since 1804.
Under the Twelfth Amendment, each elector must cast distinct votes for President and Vice President, instead of two votes for President. Pursuant to the amendment's Habitation Clause, an elector may not vote for presidential and vice-presidential candidates who both inhabit the elector's state—at least one of them must be an inhabitant of another state.
The Twelfth Amendment explicitly precludes those constitutionally ineligible to be President from being Vice President.
A majority of electoral votes is still required for a person to be elected President or Vice President. When nobody has a majority, the House of Representatives, voting by states and with the same quorum requirements as under the original procedure, chooses a President. The Twelfth Amendment requires the House to choose from the three highest receivers of electoral votes, compared to five under the original procedure.
The Senate chooses the Vice President if no candidate receives a majority of electoral votes. Its choice is limited to those with the "two highest numbers" of electoral votes. If multiple individuals are tied for second place, the Senate may consider all of them, in addition to the individual with the greatest number of votes. The Twelfth Amendment introduced a quorum requirement of two-thirds for the conduct of balloting. Furthermore, the Twelfth Amendment provides that the votes of "a majority of the whole number" of Senators are required to arrive at a choice.
In order to prevent deadlocks from keeping the nation leaderless, the Twelfth Amendment provided that if the House could not choose a President before March 4 (at that time the first day of a Presidential term), the individual elected Vice President would act as President, "as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President." The Twelfth Amendment did not state for how long the Vice President would act as President or if the House could still choose a President after March 4. Section 3 of the Twentieth Amendment replaced that provision of the Twelfth Amendment by changing the date for the commencement of Presidential terms to January 20, clarifying that the Vice President-elect would only act as President if the House has not chosen a President by January 20, and permitting the Congress to direct, through legislation, "who shall then act as President" if there is no President-elect or Vice President-elect by January 20. It also clarified that if there is no President-elect on January 20, whoever acts as President does so until a person "qualified" to occupy the Presidency is elected to be President.
Read more about this topic: Twelfth Amendment To The United States Constitution
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