United States: Congress modernizes electoral law to prevent presidents from overthrowing elections

The lower chamber voted to change this law dating from 1887 whose ambiguities had been exploited by certain Republican elected officials on January 6, 2020.

Le Monde with AFP

The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday September 21 in favor of the modernization of an American law of 135 years which the allies of Donald Trump had tried in vain to take advantage, to modify the result of the 2020 presidential election.

Fifty days from the US mid-term elections, electoral reform projects made their comeback at the US Congress. And for good reason, a large number of republican candidates still refuse to recognize the victory of Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Concretely, the text raises any ambiguity on the status of the vice-president in the certification of the presidential elections, by limiting it to a purely symbolic role. A way for elected officials to avoid chaos of January 6, 2021, when thousands of supporters of Donald Trump rushed on the Capitol to try to force the vice-president Mike Pence and the elected officials to modify the result of the election.

a competing project in the Senate

“This bill will prevent Congress from choosing the president himself illegally,” said one of his authors, the elected republican Liz Cheney. She is one of the only parties of Donald Trump to have agreed to sit in the US Congress Commission which has been investigating for more than a year on the role of the former president in the Capitol assault. All the Democrats voted in favor of his text, supported by only nine Republicans. The text finally went through 229 votes against 203.

A competitive bill is also under debate in the Senate, with slightly more likely to succeed insofar as ten republican senators have spoken in his favor, allowing him to reach the super-Majority of sixty voices necessary to break the obstruction maneuver known as “spun”.

But these two electoral reform projects are far from being as exhaustive as the great plan of Joe Biden with which the President promised to protect access to the ballot boxes of African-Americans, which associations for the defense of rights civic have severely criticized. The republican opposition had been standing against this plan in June 2021, ensuring that he confided to the Democrats the right to take control of the polls across the country.

/Media reports.