Crucial week for Biden as voting reform moves intensify

Former US first lady Michelle Obama is spearheading a campaign aimed at registering more than a million new voters across the United States in the run-up to midterm elections next November.

The campaign aims to get about 100,000 people to contact senators in their states to back voting-rights legislation and is seeking a similar number of volunteers to assist in registration and get-out-the-vote drives.

Ms Obama called for support for the campaign in an advertisement in the New York Times at the start of a crucial week for President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party as they intensify moves to get voting-rights legislation passed by the Senate and overcome what they view as attempts by Republicans to introduce measures to suppress voting across the country.

Ms Obama said: "From Georgia and Florida to Iowa and Texas, states passed laws designed to make it harder for Americans to vote. And in other state legislatures across the nation, lawmakers have attempted to do the same."

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On Tuesday Mr Biden and vice-president Kamala Harris will travel to Georgia, where they are expected to highlight the urgent need to pass legislation to protect the constitutional right to vote as well as the integrity of elections.

The Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan law and policy institute, says that between January 1st and December 7th last year, at least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting.

The issue is hugely important to Democrats as they seek to maintain their slender hold on both houses of Congress in the elections later this year.

The House of Representatives has passed two pieces of voting-rights legislation. However, both are stalled in the Senate as they do not have the 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster by Republican members.

Filibuster reform

This has led to calls from Democratic politicians and activists for reform of the filibuster system in the Senate – or at least the introduction of an exception for voting rights. However, this has been resisted by two moderate Democrats, Joe Manchin, who has also held up Mr Biden's $1.6 trillion domestic spending plan, and Kyrsten Sinema.

The Democratic leadership in the Senate wants the issue addressed by January 17th, a federal holiday known as Martin Luther King Jnr Day.

Any moves to change the filibuster rules will face major opposition from Republicans, who argue that voting rights are not genuinely in jeopardy and the whole issue is a smokescreen to break Senate traditions and allow the Democrats to push through a raft of liberal policies such as the Green New Deal or immigration reforms.

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell argued that 94 per cent of Americans believe it's easy to vote and there was record turnout in the 2020 presidential election, the biggest since 1900.

Democrats have described the claims by former president Donald Trump that the 2020 election was rigged as "the big lie". Republicans are countering that the real "big lie" is the assertion by Democrats that democracy is dying because they sometimes lose elections. Republicans have maintained that the claims about voting rights by Democrats represents "fake hysteria".

However, if the two voting-rights Bills fail, there are some indications in Washington that there could potentially be a fallback agreement on separate reforms to deal with election subversion after votes are cast rather than rolling back moves by various states to make it harder to vote in the first place.