At the time of North American independence, there were thirteen states. Even with the three states added later, there were only sixteen. How could seventy-one votes hold the advantage under the principle of "one state, one vote"?
Before America purchased Louisiana, America used a representative system. State votes were not cast directly by voters, but by electoral colleges chosen by the state legislatures. Whoever received more than half the votes and the largest number of votes became president, while the runner-up became vice president. This meant that one state could have four votes, or even more.
This system began in 1788. At first, the number of electoral votes held by each state equaled its number of senators and representatives in Parliament. Each state elected two senators, while the number of representatives was determined by the state's proportion of the population.
Not population numbers, but population proportions. Citizens and voters were not the same thing; not every American citizen had the right to vote. Women, for example, did not. The higher the ratio of voters to citizens, the more representatives a state had, and thus the more electoral votes it received. Georgia had two senators and two representatives, for a total of four votes.
Even before the election began, some people had expressed unease. The Founding Fathers' original design assumed that whoever received the most votes was the best choice, while whoever received the second-most was slightly worse. They had not considered the problem of conflicting political views between the president and vice president.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had clashed repeatedly over their political views while serving under George Washington, and Hamilton had to be added to the mix. Although Hamilton had all but lost any chance of the presidency for various reasons, he was America's Minister of Finance and