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2 U.S.C. § 7 (2024)

This is the official text of 2 U.S.C. § 7 (2024), part of Federal (US Code)’s United States Code — the codified general and permanent federal statutes of the United States, organized into more than 50 numbered titles by subject.

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Time of election

Official statutory text

The Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year, is established as the day for the election, in each of the States and Territories of the United States, of Representatives and Delegates to the Congress commencing on the 3d day of January next thereafter.

(R.S. §25; Mar. 3, 1875, ch. 130, §6, 18 Stat. 400; June 5, 1934, ch. 390, §2, 48 Stat. 879.)

Editorial Notes

Codification

R.S. §25 derived from act Feb. 2, 1872, ch. 11, §3, 17 Stat. 28.

The second sentence of this section, which was based on section 6 of the act Mar. 3, 1875 and made this section inapplicable to any State that had not yet changed its day of election and whose constitution required an amendment to change the day of election of its State officers, was omitted.

Amendments

1934—Act June 5, 1934, substituted "3d day of January" for "fourth day of March".

Constitutional Provisions

The first section of Amendment XX to the Constitution provides: "The terms of Senators and Representatives [shall end] at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin."

Time for election of Representatives, see Const. Art. I, §4, cl. 1.

Status: in_force · Read it on the official government site

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About this page: Statute text is reproduced from official government publishers via the Open US Law dataset (Vaquill AI, snapshot v2026.08, CC BY 4.0). Primary legislative text like this is public domain under the government-edicts doctrine (Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, 2020). We link every section back to its official source so you can verify it independently.