According to a statement from the Democratic National Committee on Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris is the sole candidate to qualify for the Democratic presidential nomination. Following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race, Harris now has a clear path to seek her party’s nomination uncontested.
Harris will undergo a vote by the party’s national convention delegates who will officially confirm the nominee through a new online voting process that the party recently adopted. The voting period is set to begin on Thursday and will end on August 5. Votes for candidates other than Harris will be recorded as “present.”
As per party regulations, a candidate must submit a notarized declaration of candidacy, fulfill presidential eligibility criteria, and gather electronic signatures from a minimum of 300 delegates, with no more than 50 signatures from any single delegation counting towards the 300 threshold. The DNC disclosed that 3,923 delegates supported nominating Harris.
Despite the early nomination vote, delegates will still assemble as scheduled at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in late August. The ceremony will involve a state-by-state roll call vote on the convention floor, followed by acceptance speeches from Harris and her yet-to-be-named running mate.
The DNC mentioned that automatic delegates, also known as superdelegates, will be able to vote on the initial ballot due to the overwhelming delegate support for Harris. These automatic delegates encompass Democratic members of Congress and party leadership, and were not committed to endorsing any specific candidate prior to Biden’s departure.
Following the 2016 primary, the DNC reduced the influence of automatic delegates so that in competitive primaries, they typically cannot vote in the first voting round. Nevertheless, automatic delegates may cast their vote in the first round if a candidate has “been certified by the DNC Secretary” as having secured a majority of pledged delegates.
