skygiants

Actually, if I remember correctly, the musical was tweaking the truth there a bit.

I think the reason that Burr got so many votes was that Jefferson had agreed to have him as his running mate. And by this point Jefferson and Madison had between them created a party with good discipline, so all the Republicans voted for Jefferson and Burr, whom they understood to be the Republican 'ticket,' and so those two wound up with exactly the same number of electoral votes. In today's system, that would be normal, because we understand that the president and vice president run as a pair, but this was the first time anyone had tried doing that, and the official Constitutional rules interpret "same number of votes" as "tie for the presidency," so the election got thrown into the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives was chock full of extremely bitter Federalist party members who had just been voted out of power and hated Jefferson's guts/genuinely feared he would dismantle the government. They decided, basically out of pure spite, to see if they could elect Burr president instead of Jefferson by swinging their votes to him. Which Jefferson rightly regarded as an absurd abuse of the electoral process, since none of the original people who cast their votes for Burr had been voting for him to be president, he had run as vice president.

Of course, Burr could have put a stop to this by announcing that he would not accept the presidency and had run on the understanding that he would be vice president. But did Burr do this? Definitely not. He sat back to see if the presidency would get handed to him by a confluence of political enmities.

So that's why Jefferson hated Burr's guts. I can't actually blame him on that one, myself. That is, if I'm remembering this rightly, which is about a 50/50 shot since it's been over a decade since I read up on this stuff :)