ABSTRACT
Few things vexed the framers more than determining how the president should be selected. The framers' satisfaction with their handiwork seemed justified by the nation's first presidential election, in which George Washington secured the vote of each of the 69 electors. The problems with the presidential selection process were surfacing. Efforts to fix the Constitution's obvious design flaw by requiring electors to cast separate ballots for the president and vice president were initially stymied by the same partisan motives that had wrecked the framers' original plan. How the president was selected would determine which states would exercise the most power over the nation's most important political office. The rhetoric of small and large states only thinly disguised the underlying partisan concerns that drove support for and opposition to the Twelfth Amendment. After passage of the Twelfth Amendment, Republicans no longer needed to pay much heed to the machinations of the Federalist opposition, which was fast becoming irrelevant in presidential politics.
