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I am not sure it would change much. According to the original language in the Constitution Electoral College members vote for two Persons, which I imagine have to be different people. Presumably each states' electors would vote for the President/VP that won their state same as the current procedure. This means the same President and VP probably win. Although this means the President and VP would always have the same number of EC votes so every election would go to the House. You could end up in a situation where the same two people are President and VP but which one is which is decided by state delegations in the House. Or maybe some coordination mechanism evolves for sufficient electors to vote for neither candidate such that the same President and VP win but with the President having, like, one more EC vote.
I think in a winner-takes-all state that would mean the current P/VP, in states where it's proportional, it would be split. I think that would still work out to the competing candidate being most likely to have the second-highest amount of votes.
I think this misunderstands how states that allocate EC votes proportionally work. They are not allocated proportionally according to the popular vote of the state. Rather, the states allocate one vote for the overall state winner and then one vote for the winner of each Congressional district. A description here. So the vote-getting is still winner-take-all at the level the voting is occurring at. Presumably whoever won NE-2 would get both votes, same as ME-2.
Huh... why do they explicitly mention "president and vice-president who were political opponents, constantly acting at cross-purposes" in the wiki, then?
The Results section of the 1796 election article has some details. The short version is that parties failed to unite around VP candidates. If Pinckney had won every VP vote for the Federalist party he would have beaten Jefferson easily. Part of it seems to be they tried what I mentioned in my last sentence, coordinating so that the President ended up with fewer ECs than the VP, but too many people voted for other candidates. Note that the 1800 election didn't have this problem, and by 1804 we had the 12th amendment.
Important to note that, then as now, electors formally cast their ballots at their respective state capitals. Without mass communication there was no reliable way to coordinate. If all federalists defect and vote for Jefferson and Burr, the tie gets broken in the House, where the Federalists could swing the election to Burr. If some Democrats honestly defect so Jefferson is ahead of Burr, there's the risk that poor coordination puts Adams ahead of Burr. And who's to say that, right now, there aren't Federalists defecting to Burr so he's ahead of Jefferson?
The College was so chaotic that it could have very quickly ended the Republic.
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