In a harsh and passionate speech in the Cradle of American Democracy on Tuesday (13), United States President Joe Biden called the proposals to restrict voting access a threat to the country and called on Americans to unite to protect the electoral system.
“There is an attack underway in the United States today, an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote and free and fair elections. An attack on democracy, an attack on freedom, an attack on who we are, ”he told the audience. activists, councilors and local authorities in Philadelphia.
It was in the city, located between Washington and New York, that the leaders of the American Revolutionary Revolution met in the 18th century, declared the independence of the United Kingdom and drafted the Constitution of the country, in Independence Hall, a few meters from the National Constitution. Center Biden spoke on Tuesday.
The speech was a reaction to laws under discussion in states ruled by Republican governors. Since Donald Trump’s defeat in November last year, Republican lawmakers have introduced hundreds of bills to make voting more difficult for blacks and the vulnerable, a move considered by experts to be the most dangerous since Jim Crow Laws,
who legalized racial segregation at the end of the 19th century.
According to an investigation by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, at least 17 states this year approved proposals restricting access to the vote. In the United States, each of the 50 states can determine how their elections, including national ones, are held for Members of Parliament, Senators, and the President.
One example comes from Georgia, which approved the requirement for more documents to vote, reduced polling stations and banned the distribution of food and water in queues.
In Texas, the legislature has banned unrequested distribution of advance poll ballots or by mail. The state has become a flagship example because Democrats traveled to prevent Republicans from having a quorum to pass the bill in a final vote. They traveled to Washington, along with state lawmakers across the country, to call on Congress to pass national law regulating the electoral system.
In June, Republicans in the Federal Senate succeeded in blocking a bill in this regard. Among the proposed items in the legislation that were banned were the provision of 15 days of early voting and the repeal of strict voter identification requirements in states, allowing those who voted in federal elections to submit a declaration under oath instead of an identity document.
Lawmakers in former President Donald Trump’s party advocate tightening the rules to prevent what they accuse of electoral fraud, even though the allegations have not been proven. On Tuesday, Biden reacted against efforts to invalidate last year’s election, saying “no election has been so scrutinized” as the one he won. “A big lie is just that: a big lie.”
He spoke of the January invasion of the Capitol, seat of the federal legislature, by protesters who did not accept the election result, and said the country is the most important test of democracy since the civil war in the nineteenth century. civil war. The Confederates at that time never attempted to invade the Capitol like the rebels did on January 6. And I am not saying this to alarm you. I say this because you should be alarmed.
On January 6 this year, five people died and dozens of officers were injured after a mob of Trump supporters infiltrated the congressional headquarters in an attempt to block the session that would enact Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential election. The session was interrupted, but resumed and ended on the same day.
The invasion came just minutes after Trump himself, at a rally in Washington, urged activists to come to the seat of the Legislative Assembly.
Recalling the event, Biden said the same could happen in next year’s parliamentary election. “We will face another test in 2022: an unprecedented wave of vote suppression and constant electoral subversion. We must prepare now,” he said. “We are going to put all our efforts to educate voters on changing laws, we are going to register them to vote, and then we are going to vote,” he said.
Biden even compared the suppression of votes to attacks by the white extremist group Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and 1960s and the denial of women’s votes when he declared that “denying free and fair elections is the most anti- American you can think of. of, the most undemocratic, the most unpatriotic, and unfortunately it has precedents. “