The United States House of Representatives voted on Wednesday, September 21, in favor of the modernization of a 135-year-old American law, which Donald Trump’s allies had tried, in vain, to take advantage of, to modify the result. of the November 2020 presidential election.
Fifty days before the US midterm elections, electoral reform projects have made a comeback in the US Congress. And for good reason, a large number of Republican candidates still refuse to recognize the victory of Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Concretely, the new text removes any ambiguity on the status of the vice-president of the United States in the certification of the result of the presidential election, by limiting it to a purely symbolic role. A way for elected officials to avoid the chaos of January 6, 2021, when thousands of Donald Trump supporters rushed to the Capitol to try to force Vice President Mike Pence and the senators to modify the result of the election.
A competing project in the Senate
“This bill will prevent Congress from choosing the president itself illegally”, supported one of its authors, the elected Republican Liz Cheney. She is one of the few from the “Grand Old Party” (GOP) to have agreed to sit on the US Congressional commission which has been investigating for more than a year the role of the former president in the assault on Capitol Hill. All Democrats voted in favor of his text, supported by only nine Republicans; it was adopted (229 votes for and 203 against).
A competing bill is also being debated in the Senate, with a slightly better chance of success as ten Republican senators voted in favor of it, theoretically giving it the sixty-vote supermajority needed to break a maneuver of obstruction called « filibuster ».
These two electoral reform projects are nowhere near as comprehensive as the plan through which Joe Biden promised to protect access to the ballot box for African Americans. The Republican opposition had been upwind against this proposal in June 2021, ensuring that it gave the Democrats the right to take control of the polls across the country.