Goddamn the specifics of my country's voting system. All-or-nothing electoral votes are bullshit, especially here in 55-vote California. Also, going back to the single election with runner-up getting VP would be hilarious as fuck.
The original idea was actually a little more complicated than that. While its correct that the person who ended up second in the electoral college did become Vice President, each elector cast TWO votes. At first it was usually the runner-up for president, but that created issues where the President and VP would clash on policy, which wasn't good. The result was that all the electors in one party would cast a vote for their top guy, and then one of them would not vote for the Vice President their party wanted, so that guy would end up second.
Except in 1800, they got confused about who WASN'T supposed to vote for Aaron Burr, so he and Jefferson deadlocked, and Burr decided to push to become president himself, which kind of made a mess of things. Hence the 12th Amendment that switched to a party ticket.
In short, it was an interesting idea, but even the Founding Fathers decided it was too fucking weird to actually work.
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