What are the requirements to be vice president?

Article II of the Constitution sets three eligibility requirements for the presidency. The 12th Amendment applies those same requirements to the vice presidency: no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice president.

In plain terms, a vice-presidential candidate must be a natural-born U.S. citizen, at least 35 years old when taking office, and a resident within the United States for at least 14 years. Parties and campaigns add political tests - geography, ideology, fundraising - but those are not constitutional requirements.

A second rule matters for tickets: the 12th Amendment effectively requires electors to vote for a president and vice president who are not both inhabitants of the same state as the elector in a way that wastes the vote - in practice, major-party tickets almost always pick running mates from different states to avoid any Electoral College friction.

Term limits also interact with the vice presidency. Someone who has already been elected president twice is widely understood to be ineligible for the presidency under the 22nd Amendment and therefore ineligible for the vice presidency under the 12th. That is why two-term presidents such as Barack Obama - and, after two elections, Donald Trump - are not realistic VP options.