US Constitution: how the electors voted

Under the original rule each elector voted for two people without saying which of them was for president, and the runner-up became vice president. The tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr in 1800 showed the flaw, and the twelfth amendment replaced the rule in 1804. Almost every noun here starts with a capital letter, which is how the document was written throughout. That habit makes the passage harder to type than its length suggests.

Where this text comes fromWhat you copy is the original wording of the ballot procedure, set down as the convention wrote it in 1787. The document is never tidied as it grows: amendments are printed after the articles rather than folded into them, so the page carries an earlier wording and a later one in sequence and the reader works out from the numbering which came when. That habit is why the text reads oddly to anyone expecting a clean statute. It also explains the vocabulary, which is procedural rather than declaratory: meet, vote, make a list, sign, certify, transmit. Six verbs, in order, describing what a person does with a piece of paper.

What you might not noticeEvery noun in this clause carries a capital: Electors, States, Ballot, Persons, Inhabitant, List, Number, Votes, Seat, Government, President, Senate. Not one verb does, so the Shift key tracks the nouns exactly. Source

What it trainsNineteen capital letters in 417 characters, seventeen of them inside sentences, which works out at a Shift press roughly every fourth word. The pattern is regular rather than random, and the regularity is the trap: the hand starts predicting where Shift belongs, and prediction is what puts a capital on a word that has none. Five commas and one semicolon divide two sentences of thirty-one and forty-seven words, so the second runs half as long again as the first on only one extra pause. Nothing is hyphenated. Four words tie for longest at ten letters, respective, Inhabitant, themselves and Government, spread evenly enough that no single stretch is harder than another.

Read the full text at the publisher: U.S. National Archives