Democratic National Committee to hold virtual roll call vote before convention

The Democratic National Committee’s rule-making group established procedures for candidates to contest the primary nomination ahead of the convention in Chicago next month, largely eliminating any chance of a 1960s-style floor fight.

Democrats will legally nominate their candidate – presumably Vice-President Kamala Harris – as early as 1 August through a virtual roll call vote, the first time Democrats have used such a process.

Harris is now the presumptive nominee after more than 2,500 delegates have said that they will support her candidacy in a nomination vote. Technically, they could still flake out and vote for someone else in the nomination, said DNC chair Jaime Harrison on a call with the rules committee Wednesday.

“Delegates are free to support who they choose, and we are glad that they are engaging in this important moment in history,” Harrison said. “As a party, we have an obligation to design and implement a fair nomination process for delegates to officially express their preferences through a vote, resulting in eventually an official nominee of the Democratic party who will go on to the top of the ballot in November.”

For a potential challenger to Harris, the window to file a notice of candidacy opens Thursday and closes Saturday, 27 July at 6pm ET. A candidate must submit a petition with 300 signatures from delegates before 30 July to be considered as a candidate for a vote by convention delegates. In the absence of a contest, the virtual roll call vote will be held on 1 August, said Minyon Moore, chair of the Democratic national convention. If not, virtual voting would begin on 3 August.

The rules committee adopted the change Wednesday at a meeting, to help thwart legal challenges to Democratic ballot access in Ohio.

Normally, the state-by-state call of the roll at the Democratic national convention is both part of the pageantry of the political process and a legal matter for election law.

States with relatively early ballot nomination deadlines, like Ohio, have traditionally accommodated the convention schedule of major party candidates in the past with a legislative exception. In 2020, for example, the Republican national convention was scheduled in September, months after the state’s 9 August deadline.

This year, in a fit of pique over an administrative ruling that temporarily barred Donald Trump from the ballot in Colorado, conservative lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature dug in their heels and refused to extend the ballot deadline for Biden.

While the legislature ultimately convened a special session to pass an exception in July, Ohio law requires 90 days for any change to its election law to go into effect, and legislators rejected an addendum to their exception that would override the 90-day waiting period. It creates a legal question that Republicans can be expected to exploit in a post-election legal contest, said Patrick McNally, the committee’s attorney.

“A virtual process will solve our practical timing problems,” McNally said. “Failure to certify both nominees in advance of each state’s ballot access deadline opens us up to very real political and litigation risk both before and after the election. Republicans will use this moment to do what they do; to sue, to try to bar us from the ballot or try to disqualify our voters and to suggest that somehow the party’s nominating process was improper.

The Trump campaign filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission today to try to block Harris from accessing $91m in joint campaign funds raises for the then Biden-Harris ticket. Meanwhile, the Republican House speaker Mike Johnson questioned the legality of Harris’s accession to the nomination, describing the process so far as going “into a backroom somewhere and switch it out and put someone else on the top of the ticket”.

The Democratic national convention is scheduled for 19-22 August in Chicago.