Harris to be sole Democratic presidential candidate heading into official party vote

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Kamala Harris is the only White House hopeful who has qualified to compete for the Democratic presidential nomination, the Democratic National Committee said in a statement on Tuesday.

Although no other major Democrat had indicated any plans to challenge Harris, the DNC’s announcement officially clears the path for the vice president to seek her party’s nomination uncontested, just nine days after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and created a vacancy at the top of the ticket.

Harris will now face a vote by the party’s national convention delegates, who will officially ratify the nominee in a new online voting procedure adopted by the party last week. Voting will begin Thursday and will conclude on August 5, the release said. Votes for anyone other than Harris will be tallied as “present.” According to an Associated Press survey, Harris was the overwhelming choice of convention delegates to replace Biden as the party’s standard-bearer and face Republican former President Donald Trump on the ballot in November.

Under party rules, a candidate qualifies to compete for the nomination by submitting a notarized declaration of candidacy, meeting legal requirements to be president and securing the electronic signatures of at least 300 delegates, with no more than 50 signatures from any one delegation counting toward the 300 minimum. The DNC announced that 3,923 delegates had petitioned to nominate Harris.

Despite the early vote to select a nominee, delegates will still convene as planned in late August at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The party will convene a ceremonial state-by-state roll call vote on the convention floor, followed by acceptance speeches by Harris and her soon-to-be-named running mate.

The release said automatic delegates, also known as superdelegates, will be allowed to vote on the first ballot since rank-and-file delegates were overwhelmingly for Harris. Automatic delegates include Democratic members of Congress and party leadership, and were not pledged to support any candidate even before Biden dropped out.

After the 2016 primary, the DNC scaled back the role of automatic delegates so that in competitive primaries, they generally cannot vote in the first round of voting. However, automatic delegates may vote in the first round if a candidate “has been certified by the DNC Secretary” to have obtained a majority of pledged delegates.

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AP writer Leah Askarinam contributed.