Adams captured the presidency by only three electoral votes, defeating Thomas Jefferson by a vote of seventy-one to sixty-eight. Because the vice president went to the person with the second most number of electoral votes, Jefferson ironically became Adams’s vice president even though Jefferson was a member of a different political party. Adams ran as a Federalist, while Jefferson was a Democratic-Republican. It was the only time in American history that a president and vice president came from two different parties, because Congress changed the voting procedure in the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.