Death of a president-elect before 1933

I am currently working on a timeline in which Philander C. Knox gains the Republican nomination for president in 1920. He would die on January 21st of the next year. The electoral college votes would have already been counted, yet there would be no president elect. Given that the 20th amendment wouldn’t be ratified for over a decade, his VP wouldn’t be automatically chosen. What would happen next?
 
His running mate would be sworn in as Vice President on March 4, then immediately sworn in again as President. The relevant text from Article II of the constitution:
In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President
It only takes a slightly broad reading of this to apply it to your scenario: the elected President is dead, so the VP becomes President. Without the 20th Amendment, he needs to be sworn in as VP first rather than immediately becoming President-Elect in Knox's place. This reading is affirmed by the 12th Amendment's description for the procedure for a deadlocked contingent election for President:
And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.
A strict reading of this suggests the VP-elect would become Acting President rather than President, but 1) that's a distinction without a difference when there's no chance the President would seek to reassert his office and there's no provisions for a special election, and 2) the Tyler precedent (that the VP becomes President, not Acting President) is very firmly established by this point.

In addition, there aren't any suggestions in the Constitutional text or historical precedent suggesting anyone other than the VP-elect might become President in this scenario, so there's no real endgame for anyone who wants to argue against the "VP-elect becomes President" interpretation.
 
"What if the president-elect died?...The committee was fairly sure that even without its amendment (which became part of Section 3 of the Twentieth Amendment), the vice president-elect would take the oath as president in such an instance, but they thought that the path would be smoothed by adding express constitutional language to that effect. See U.S. CONST. amend. XX, § 3; H.R. REP. No. 69-31 l, at 7. One can imagine that otherwise, the losing presidential candidate might call for a new election or, if the electoral votes had not yet been counted, for the dead president-elect's electoral votes not to be counted, throwing the election into the House." https://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1620&context=facpubs
 
"What if the president-elect died?...The committee was fairly sure that even without its amendment (which became part of Section 3 of the Twentieth Amendment), the vice president-elect would take the oath as president in such an instance, but they thought that the path would be smoothed by adding express constitutional language to that effect. See U.S. CONST. amend. XX, § 3; H.R. REP. No. 69-31 l, at 7. One can imagine that otherwise, the losing presidential candidate might call for a new election or, if the electoral votes had not yet been counted, for the dead president-elect's electoral votes not to be counted, throwing the election into the House." https://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1620&context=facpubs

If I may wander briefly into pre-1900 territory, this raises an interesting question.

Per your link, the House voted not to count the three Greeley votes, but only just - 101-99. The Senate was massively in favour of counting them, but under the rules then in place, they could not be counted unless both houses agreed. Shortly afterward, the rule was changed to say that a vote could only be rejected if both houses agreed.

This made a big difference in 1876, since under the old rules, had the Democratic House and Republican Senate disagreed (a dead cert), then the 19 votes of FL, LA and SC would simply not have been counted, presumably handing Tilden victory 184-166. Is it likely that the rule change would have taken place w/o the Greeley precedent?
 
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