Off-year election

On the ballot are many mayors, a wide variety of citizen and legislatively referred incentives and referendums in various states, and many more local public offices.

Before Congress began to standardize elections for the House of Representatives in 1872, individual states could schedule theirs into the first months of an odd-numbered year.

Under the original rules of Article 1, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, senators were chosen by state legislatures instead of direct elections.

This meant that they were affected by legislative deadlock, and seats would remain vacant for months or years until their state legislatures could agree on who to send to the Senate.

[11] Even though large majorities from both major political parties want to shift to on-cycle elections,[11] these interest groups have used their political power to slow down some but not all of the reform efforts, with California, Arizona and Nevada seeing significant success in shifting local elections on-cycle.