Thomas Jefferson Won the Presidency on the 36th Ballot

Inside the Capitol in Washington, the voting would not stop. Outside, snowstorms raged. Inside, people were carried in on stretchers to cast another ballot for president.

It was February 1801. When the votes of the electors, the people who formally cast the votes for president, were counted on Feb. 11, Thomas Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, a New York lawyer who had delivered the state of New York for the ticket, had finished tied with 73 votes apiece.

This is the story of how America picked a president by voting 36 times, and why it mattered. The tie threw the election into the House of Representatives, where each of the 16 states cast a single vote, and it left the young republic without a winner for days.

The tie was never supposed to happen. The plan had been 73 votes for Jefferson and 72 for Burr, with one of Jefferson's own electors supposed to vote for Jefferson but leave Burr off. He forgot to leave Burr off, though the exact reason remains unclear.

If Burr had been almost anyone else, he would have bowed out and acknowledged that Jefferson was meant to be president. Instead, Burr, who once said he had gone into politics "for fun and honor and profit," saw a chance to be president himself and refused to yield.

So the House voted, and voted again. Federalists who regarded Jefferson as brilliant and dangerous backed Burr to block Jefferson. Ballot after ballot was tied as the days slipped by.

At last, after 35 deadlocked ballots, the deadlock broke. On the 36th ballot, Jefferson won. Even Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist leader and Jefferson's longtime rival, conceded the point in a remark, saying "there is no doubt but that upon every virtuous and prudent calculation Jefferson is to be preferred" because "He is by far not so dangerous a man and he has pretentions to character."

Jefferson thus became the third president of the United States. The long count showed that power could pass peacefully from one party to another.