‘… we Filipinos still do the stupid thing and vote separately for president and vice president, very often putting two people a heartbeat away who do not see eye-to-eye…’
NON-HISTORIANS closely following the US presidential elections — including the discussion on the Electoral College and whether this institution is still relevant — may not be aware that presidential elections were not always conducted this way.
While the Electoral College has always been a fixture of elections, the original manner of voting is not what we know it today.
Originally, the Electoral College would cast two votes, theoretically one for president and one for vice president. But they didn’t have a clear list of presidential and vice-presidential candidates to choose from. Instead, this is what happened: the presidential candidate who received the highest number of votes was elected president, and the vice-presidential candidate who received the second highest number of votes was elected vice president!
This was how George Washington was elected in 1789 with 69 out of the 72 electors, while John Adams, with the second highest tally of 34 electors, was chosen vice president.
In 1792, Washington received the maximum 132 electoral votes and Adams was again second with 77, and so they held on to the posts for another four years.
In 1795, Adams was elected president with 71 votes as a candidate of the Federalist Party, while the candidate of the newly-established Democrat-Republican party, Thomas Jefferson, with 68 votes, became vice president. In effect, the leader of the opposition was now vice president and one heartbeat away from the presidency.
During the election of 1800, Jefferson and Aaron Burr ended up tied — throwing the elections to the House of Representatives —which fueled the adoption of the 12th Amendment to the US Constitution clarifying that electors should choose a president and vice president separately, mainly to avoid the confusion of 1800 and, worse, the situation in 1796 where the US president had to work with the leader of the opposition who was sitting as vice president.
The Americans quickly widened up to the silliness of electing a president and a vice president from opposing sides of the political divide.
They wisened up in 1804. That was 220 years ago. Yet in this year of our Lord 2024 we Filipinos still do the stupid thing and vote separately for president and vice president, very often putting two people a heartbeat away who do not see eye-to-eye and have very different visions for a future.
Of course, a ticket can still be elected as a team in the Philippines but then they split apart as the UniTeam has shown. But this is a rarity, which can be cured by a second suggestion I will detail on Monday. For today’s purposes, however, I simply wish to argue that Philippine presidential elections should be all about tandems — we should always be voting for a ticket and in fact, it may be best if we make it clear that a vote for a presidential candidate is a vote for his vice-presidential candidate.
Split voting for president and vice president should be stopped. Americans realized how stupid it was to elect rivals as president and vice president — and they realized this 22 decades ago!
It’s time for the Philippines to follow suit. Tandems should matter.
