ATLANTA — As Jimmy Carter celebrates his 99th birthday Sunday, discredited claims of election fraud continue to emanate from the leading Republican presidential contender in 2024.
But 62 years ago -- when Carter was a 36-year-old political newcomer -- Carter became embroiled in an election fraud case himself, verified within weeks by a Georgia court.
Carter’s first election was a cautionary mid-20th century tale of how one corrupt man could change an election outcome if he thought nobody was watching.
In 1962, Jimmy Carter was a small town businessman, farmer and school board chairman. When a progressive Augusta Democrat named Carl Sanders decided to run for governor, Carter decided to run for the state senate in a seven-county district.
But he ran afoul of the Democratic party chairman in rural Quitman County. Joe Hurst had no qualms about manipulating the vote to favor Carter’s opponent in the Democratic primary.
Carter's opponent was Homer Moore, who Carter "knew and respected as an honest business competitor," Carter wrote in his 2015 book "A Full Life: Reflections at 90."
He also talked about Hurst's intervention in an interview posted on the Georgia State Senate YouTube channel.
"The county boss stuffed the ballot box in favor of my opponent. 126 people voted alphabetically. A third of them were either dead or in prison. They were not qualified to vote but they cast ballots anyway," Carter recounted.
Hurst "was requiring all voters to mark their ballots on a table in front of him and telling them to vote for Homer Moore," Carter wrote in his book. "The ballots were then dropped through a large hole in a pasteboard box, and John (Pope, a Carter friend) watched Hurst reach into the box several times, remove some ballots, and discard them."
Carter had heard about the illegal votes in Quitman County, filed a protest and was ignored. So he talked to reporters in Atlanta, who uncovered verifiable evidence of vote fraud.
Meantime, friends and family were urging Carter to drop the challenge and run again in two years.
"It was pretty flagrant. The person who had voted right before the polls closed said (he) was number 332 or something like that, and there were two or three (voters) after (him)," said Dr. Charles Bullock, Georgia state political scientist, in a 2015 interview with. "But when they counted the ballots there were 420 of them."
Carter wrote that a box of ballots disappeared, only to be found under the bed of one of Hurst's daughters.
"More than 100 were rolled up together on top and encircled by a rubber band. In a lengthy statement, speaking slowly and with long pauses, (Carter's attorney, Charles) Kirbo described what had been revealed and compared the situation to an account of a chicken thief who dragged a broom behind him to conceal his tracks from the sheriff. With no ballot stubs or voters’ lists, Hurst had left no way to determine how many ballots should be in the box."
A judge overturned the senate election. Voters in the senate district cast ballots again and Carter won the primary overwhelmingly. Because no Republican was on the ballot, Carter took his seat in the state senate in 1963.
Hurst ended up in prison and died while Jimmy Carter was governor of Georgia.
The Carter Center, founded by the former president and his wife Rosalyn, has monitored elections around the world for decades, framed by Carter's first-hand experience with election malfeasance.