Final answer:
The 17th Amendment required a two-thirds vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, followed by ratification from three-quarters of state legislatures to pass.
Step-by-step explanation:
In order to pass the 17th Amendment, the U.S. Constitution required that any proposed amendment receive a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress—the House of Representatives and the Senate—before it could be sent to the state legislatures for ratification.
Following this process, the proposed amendment then needed to be ratified by three-quarters of the state legislatures in order to become part of the Constitution. The process reflects the framers' desire to make changing the Constitution a deliberate process, ensuring widespread agreement across the nation's diverse states.
When the 17th Amendment, concerning the direct election of senators, was passed, it achieved the necessary two-thirds majority in both houses: 64 to 24 in the Senate and 238 to 39 in the House, displaying broad support for this fundamental change in how senators were elected.