VIEWPOINT | When the U.S. House got the final presidential vote

Guest column by David Adler, The Alturas Institute

James Madison, writing in August of 1823 from his home in Montpelier, Virginia, to which he repaired in what turned out be a futile effort to retire from public life, continued to assess the defects of the Constitution, including the way America elects its president. Madison, who preferred direct election of the president, addressed what he regarded as a foundational weakness in our electoral system. In the case of a tie in the Electoral College, the Twelfth Amendment requires the U.S. House of Representatives to choose the next president. Madison called for a constitutional amendment to correct this flawed mechanism. “The present rule of voting for the President by the house of Representatives,” the Father of the Constitution declared, “is so great a departure from the Republican principle of numerical equality, and even from the federal rule which qualified the numerical by a State equality and is so pregnant also with a mischievous tendency in practice, that an amendment of the Constitution on this point is justly called for by all its considerate and best friends.”

VIEWPOINT | First presidential election doubled as trial for U.S. Constitution