His concern was sparked by a blatant effort to steal his first election race.
His concern was sparked by a blatant effort to steal his first election race.
I n all the coverage of the good and bad things in Jimmy Carter’s record of public service, there’s been little discussion of the important bipartisan role he played in promoting election integrity. He took a lot of heat from fellow Democrats for his role in supporting voter ID laws and issuing cautions on the overuse of mail-in ballots, and he deserves recognition for what he did.
In 2005, Carter was a quarter century removed from his time in the White House, but at age 80 he agreed to co-chair 21-member bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform. His fellow co-chair was James Baker, a former treasury secretary under Ronald Reagan and secretary of state under George H. W. Bush.
The group, organized by American University’s Center for Democracy and Election Management, spent five months studying and hearing testimony on how to clean up our election systems in the wake of the 2000 Bush v. Gore recount fiasco in Florida. Polls on the eve of the 2004 election found that only one-third of Americans were confident their ballot would be counted.
The commission’s final list of 87 recommendations represented a gold-standard guide on how to restore public confidence in the running of elections. Slowly but surely, many of their proposals have been implemented in most states. Some are no-brainers, such as requiring states to establish uniform procedures for counting provisional ballots, and can help ward off legal challenges based on ballots being treated differently depending on where they were cast. States were urged to develop backup plans for equipment failures on Election Day. Other proposals, such as putting states instead of local jurisdictions in charge of voter registration, have led to more accurate voter lists.
But there was outrage among liberals when it was reported that 18 of the 21 commissioners had concluded that voters should be required to present photo identification at the polls.
The recommendation was tagged “controversial,” even though opinion polls consistently show that well over 80 percent of voters favor the idea. If photo ID requirements are a controversy, how does one define a consensus? The ID recommendation was particularly noteworthy, because while the commission concluded that there was no evidence of “extensive fraud” in U.S. elections, it found that it does occur “and could affect the outcome of a close election.” Further, “The electoral system cannot inspire public confidence if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud or to confirm the identity of voters.” Susan Molinari, a former Republican congresswoman from New York who served on the commission but voted for Kamala Harris this year, noted bluntly that, “in 2004, elections in Washington state and Wisconsin were decided by illegal votes.”
Just three of the 21 commissioners dissented over the photo ID recommendation, and one was Tom Daschle, a former Democratic Senate majority leader. He likened the ID requirements to a “poll tax.” But that racially charged analogy is bunk because the panel recommended that identification cards be provided at no cost to those who need them. And photo ID if anything makes it significantly less likely that someone would be wrongly turned away at the polls owing to out-of-date registration lists or for more insidious reasons.
In any case, the tacit acknowledgment by Carter and most of the other liberals on the commission that the integrity of the ballot is every bit as important as access to the ballot is a welcome one. In response to critics, Carter called the ID proposal a “move forward in getting more people to vote. It would not restrict people from voting.” Turnout numbers in recent elections, which show minority voter participation in states with voter ID laws has continued to increase, bear out his judgment.
In 2021, Carter did change his mind and express qualified support for the expanded use of mail-in ballots in the aftermath of the COVID crisis. “In the 16 years since the report’s release, vote-by-mail practices have progressed significantly as new technologies have been developed. In light of these advances, I believe that voting by mail can be conducted in a manner that ensures election integrity,” he said.
But Carter stood by the rest of the conclusions in the 2005 report. Among them was a statement that “while vote-by-mail appears to increase turnout for local elections, there is no evidence that it significantly expands participation in federal elections.” Recent studies continue to bear out that finding.
At the time of the Carter-Baker Commission report, many people were surprised at the intensity of Carter’s support for measures to ensure election integrity. They need not have been. Few people know it, but he was the victim of massive vote fraud in his first race for public office — for state senator in Georgia in 1962.
Carter told the story of how his own political career was almost ended before it began in his 1992 book, Turning Point. James Fallows of The Atlantic, a former Carter speechwriter, called it “the best thing” the former president has ever written.
In 1962, Carter was a 38 year-old Naval Academy graduate who had returned home to Plains to run his family’s peanut business. In the spring of that year, a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling mandated that legislative districts had to be roughly equal in population, according to the “one man, one vote” principle.
That decision meant dramatic change in Georgia, where local political bosses in rural areas had long exercised inordinate power because of a rule requiring that every county, no matter how small, had to have at least one seat in the legislature. Urban counties were thus shortchanged in terms of influence, while rural political bosses could lord it over a few thousand easily manipulated white voters. Blacks, of course, were almost never allowed to vote. Carter recalls that when a black man tried to register in Plains in 1962 he was chased away by a gun-wielding registrar.
In Carter’s case, the Supreme Court decision meant that his county of Sumter was joined with the neighboring county of Quitman in a new state senate district. But Quitman was the effective property of Joe Hurst, a local boss who wielded real power, because half of the 3,000 people in the county received some form of welfare, and he made a point of personally delivering the checks and making a connection between his political survival and the economic survival of his voters.
The Democratic primary for the seat pitted Carter against Homer Moore, Hurst’s handpicked candidate. But Election Day showed how difficult Carter’s challenge would be. There was a tradition in some Georgia counties that called for local officials to withhold the results until they saw which way the election was going.
Then, mysteriously, enough votes were found to shift the vote to another candidate. Lyndon Johnson was the beneficiary of just such a tactic in 1948, when Ballot Box 13 was discovered days after the polls closed with just enough votes in it to give him a U.S. Senate seat by a margin of 87 votes.
But Hurst didn’t stop at a slow count to make sure Carter would lose. The graveyards were scoured for names of people who could return from the dead for just one day to help the boss out a final time. Hurst also moved the polling station in Quitman’s biggest town, Georgetown, from a spacious public building to a cramped office where he could force voters to mark their preference in full view of himself or his stooges. Sometimes even that didn’t suffice for Hurst’s purposes. According to a Carter campaign worker, Hurst challenged an elderly couple after they had voted: “Wait a minute, Mr. Spear, and let me see if you all have learned the right way to vote. You know I have been trying to teach you for a long time.”
After noting that the couple had voted for Carter, an angry Hurst lost his temper. According to the campaign worker, he tore up the two ballots and said: “Give me some fresh ballots and let me teach them one more time.” He then took six ballots and openly scratched out Jimmy Carter’s name on all six, folded them and deposited them in the ballot box. “That’s the way you are supposed to vote,” he told the couple. “If I ever catch you all voting wrong again, your house might burn down!”
Carter’s legal team collected bushels of evidence of fraud and sought to overturn his 139-vote loss in the primary. They compiled files showing that votes had been cast by people who were out of town, in prison, and falsely registered. In addition, some precincts showed voters casting ballots in alphabetical order.
Despite all this, Hurst had the election review committee in Quitman summarily dismiss Carter’s complaint without a hearing. But Carter persisted and won a hearing before a state judge, Carl Crow. In court, it became clear that something was wrong. A ballot box from Quitman was brought in and its seals were found to be faked, the stubs for all the ballots had been “lost,” and a total of 431 votes had been cast even though only 333 people had shown up to vote. Hurst allies said the excess votes represented absentee ballots, which couldn’t be produced because they were “missing.” Judge Crow ruled that Carter had indeed won the election and was able to order that Carter’s name appear on the general election ballot with just hours to spare. The power of the Quitman machine was broken. Joe Hurst ended up in jail on a moonshine charge, which is akin to Al Capone going to prison for income tax evasion.
But problems persisted in Georgia for years afterward. Carter recalls a 1964 debate in the state senate in which another state senator moved a tongue-in-cheek bill that declared, “No person may vote either in the Democratic primary or in the general election in the State of Georgia who has been deceased more than three years.” Carter writes, “There followed a lively debate concerning the exact time interval between death and the loss of voting privileges.”
The political experience of seeing his first election almost stolen from him made Carter a lifelong proponent of election reform. After his presidency he founded the Carter Center, which still advises countries all over the world on best election practices and monitors results for fairness and accuracy. But the work the former president performed on the Carter-Baker Commission may go down as his most lasting contribution to ensuring election integrity.