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Joe Biden will sign an executive order expanding voting rights on Sunday, the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when police brutally attacked a voting right march in Selma, Alabama.
Republicans have put forward more than 250 measures in state legislatures that aim to restrict voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Biden referred to these measures in comments delivered remotely to a breakfast at the unit in Selma on Sunday, saying: “We can’t let them succeed.”
“If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide,” he said. “Let more people vote.”
House Democrats passed HR1 last week, a bill that contains some of the most comprehensive measures to expand voting rights since the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Amid growing efforts to restrict voting rights, there are more and more calls for Democrats to bypass the 60s voting obstruction in the US Senate to approve the measure.
The US constitution gives the president little power over the right to vote. The executive order that Biden will sign will therefore implement relatively modest, but potentially consequential, changes.
The most significant will instruct federal agencies to offer voter registration opportunities if a state so requests, under a federal law of 1993.
Providing voter registration opportunities at agencies could increase registration rates among populations where they are currently behind. Voter registration with the Indian Health Service, for example, could affect more than 1.9 million American Indians and Alaskan natives, according to an estimate by the Brennan Center for Justice.
Offering registration with the Veterans’ Association can reach almost 20 million voters and doing the same at immigration offices can affect more than 760,000 each year.
Another provision of the order requires the Department of Justice to provide people in federal custody – including those on parole – with information about voter registration and “as far as possible and appropriate” to facilitate voting by mail.
States have very different policies about when people with a felony conviction can vote and navigating these rules can be extremely difficult for people once they are released from prison.
Biden’s order also instructs the attorney general to establish procedures to help previously arrested people obtain identification they can use to vote.
The order also instructs the federal government to study how to improve voting access for people with disabilities and how each federal agency can improve electoral registration opportunities.
He directs officials to come up with a plan to improve vote.gov, the federal website for information on votes. Biden will also establish an American Indian voting rights guidance group and will instruct the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Defense to study how to improve access to votes for federal and military officials, as well as Americans abroad.