WASHINGTON More than 100 voting rights activists marched to the White House on Tuesday to urge President Joe Biden to endorse changes to Senate filibuster rules that would allow Democrats to pass major legislation to protect and expand voting rights.

Senate Democratic leaders will bring the Freedom to Vote Act , a bill to enshrine voting rights protections and other election reforms into federal law, up for consideration on Wednesday. But the bill, which adopts many key provisions from voting bills that have already passed the House, will almost certainly fall short of the 60 votes it needs to advance past a Republican filibuster.

Republicans have twice filibustered other major voting rights bills that are meant to counteract more than a dozen new laws GOP-controlled state legislatures have enacted to restrict the right to vote , a push driven by former President Donald Trump s lies that the 2020 election was stolen through widespread voter fraud.

Chanting Hey, Joe, the filibuster has got to go and painting the legislation as vital to the preservation of American democracy, the activists rallied outside the White House to demand more urgency and action from Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris .

Both former senators, Biden and Harris support the legislation and have called it a priority. But neither has explicitly backed changes to filibuster rules that would allow Democrats to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and other key voting rights-related bills with a simple majority, the only plausible path for those bills to become law.

We have 51 votes to pass urgently-needed voting rights legislation. A minority of senators are imposing the power of the filibuster, saying there will be no debate, there will be no vote, said Ben Jealous, the president of People For the American Way, a progressive grassroots group that helped organize the demonstration. In an instance like that, the only thing that really breaks through is when the president of the United States himself calls on the Senate to fix or nix the filibuster.