CHICAGO (NewsNation) — Delegates to the Democratic National Convention will officially select their nominee for president in a process that begins Thursday.
This year, however, delegates will fill out electronic ballots remotely more than two weeks before the party gathers at Chicago’s United Center.
Vice President Kamala Harris will be the only candidate eligible to receive votes after no other candidate qualified by a Tuesday night deadline.
Dubbed a “virtual roll call” by Democratic National Committee officials, the process will allow Harris to claim the nomination by Monday, just 15 days after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek a second term.
Why is this happening before the convention?
It gets complicated.
DNC officials first indicated in May that they would conduct a virtual roll call to clear a potential hurdle in getting the Democratic nominee on the ballot in Ohio. Ohio’s deadline to file for the general election ballot is Aug. 7, two weeks before Democratic delegates would have crowned the nominee at the convention.
Although the deadline had been modified in previous presidential election years to accommodate late-summer conventions of both parties, this year, state Republicans initially planned to enforce the existing deadline, with one GOP lawmaker calling the scheduling bind “a Democratic problem.”
The Republican-controlled legislature did eventually make the change at the behest of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, but the law does not go into effect until Aug. 31. Citing concerns that Ohio Republicans could still try to block their candidate from getting on the ballot despite the legislative fix, DNC officials decided to move forward with their virtual roll call as originally planned.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
