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That’s roughly how the system was originally designed. Prior to the 12th Amendment, when the Electoral College assembled, electors would cast votes for president – only one vote per candidate was allowed and they could only vote for one candidate from their state. The votes would be tallied and the candidate with support from the largest majority of electors would be elected president; the next-highest scoring would become Vice President. That’s why Thomas Jefferson of the Democratic-Republican Party became Vice President to John Adams of the Federalist Party.
However, the election of 1800 threw the flaws of the system into relief. The framers had not anticipated political parties and when they emerged they tried to nominate candidates for both the presidency and vice presidency. But there was no way for electors to distinguish votes between them, so the potential was there for the vice presidential nominee to be elected president. Electors would try to engineer results such that the vice presidential nominee would get one less vote than the presidential nominee.
For reasons that I’m not clear on, the Democratic-Republican electors messed up in 1800 and wound up causing a tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr (the VP candidate). The election was sent to the House because nobody had a majority and it took ballot after ballot for Jefferson to finally get elected because (a) Burr decided to keep his name in consideration and (b) the Federalists, who controlled the House, preferred Burr to Jefferson.
Afterwards, the constitution was amended to separate votes for President and Vice President and that’s how things stand today.
Anyway, I’m not really a fan of your idea – how exactly would it encourage bipartisanship? It’d be much more likely to result in an elected but powerless Vice President using his position as a bully pulpit to continue a campaign against the sitting President. For example, if Clinton had a Republican as his Veep, it’s very likely that that Republican would simply never end his campaign and be the highest-ranking opposition leader to the President.
Now, maybe there’s some value in that – it could become like a British-parliament style “Shadow President” but that’s not what you’re talking about. You’re talking about encouraging bipartisanship. I see no way that electing them separately would do that.
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