US President Joe Biden waves as he boards Air Force One on Wednesday at Andrews Air Force Base. Biden is embarking on the first overseas trip of his term, and is eager to reassert the US on the world stage, steadying European allies deeply shaken by his predecessor Donald Trump. Photo: AP

 US President Joe Biden on Tuesday called on Republican lawmakers to join Democrats in passing the federal legislation that will protect Americans' right to vote, given a cascade of restrictive voting laws have been enacted in Republican-controlled states.

Delivering an impassioned speech in Philadelphia, the president ripped into Republican lawmakers in red states for their efforts to push for or enact laws that are intended to make it harder to vote, saying the nation is "facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War" while calling for a "coalition of Americans of every background and political party" to protect the right to vote.

"We'll be asking my Republican friends in Congress and states and cities and counties to stand up for God's sake, and help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our election and the sacred right to vote," Biden said.

The president accused the Republicans of distorting facts and failing to uphold the Constitution, with a thinly veiled pointing at former president Donald Trump.

"In America, if you lose, you accept the results," Biden said inside the atrium of the National Constitution Center. "You don't call facts 'fake' and then try to bring down the American experiment just because you're unhappy. That's not statesmanship. That's selfishness."

Still trying every means to convince Americans that the 2020 elections were stolen from him, Trump said in a statement issued hours ahead of Biden's speech that Biden should let a Republican-led audit in Pennsylvania "go forward."

While singling out Philadelphia as "one of the most corrupt cities in the Country," Trump in the statement also mentioned a number of cities where Democrats have a historical tradition of prevailing over Republicans in elections, saying "corruption has gone for years" in those places, but "reached new levels" in the 2020 presidential elections.

Trump lost almost all of the legal proceedings that he and his allies initiated in the aftermath of the 2020 elections trying to overturn the results. 

Judges across the country by and large had not found enough evidence to change the outcomes.