Jimmy Carter was not a good president. Inflation, gas lines, and the Iran hostage crisis defined four years that Americans mostly wanted to forget. He gave us Ronald Reagan, so I’ll give him that. But otherwise…
After he left the White House, Democrats turned him into something close to a secular saint. They love talking about the good version of Carter: the Nobel Peace Prize winner, the international election monitor, the humanitarian who built houses well into his 90s.
What they don't like to talk about is what that same celebrated past president had to say about voter ID.
Today, if you listen to Democrats in Washington, requiring a photo ID to vote sits somewhere between a war crime and a hate crime. It's "Jim Crow." It's "voter suppression." It's a scheme, they insist, designed specifically to keep black Americans from voting, because, according to Democrats, black people don't know how to obtain a photo ID.
Never mind that identification is required to buy alcohol, board a plane, cash a check, or apply for government assistance. According to today's Democrat Party, asking someone to prove who they are before they cast a ballot is uniquely, irredeemably racist voter suppression.
Every prominent Democrat in elected office has fallen in line behind this position. Polling tells a different story among ordinary Americans. Voter ID enjoys broad, bipartisan support with the public, including Democrat voters. It's one of the rare issues where the public actually largely agrees with each other regardless of party or race.
Still, Democrats in Congress won't listen. Commonsense legislation like the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and a valid photo ID to vote in federal elections, is stuck in the Senate because of the filibuster.
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But a clip resurfacing on social media this week undercuts the entire Democrat argument, and it comes from an unlikely source: Jimmy Carter himself.
In 2005, Carter co-chaired the bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform alongside former Secretary of State James Baker. The commission formed in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election.
The commission recommended voter ID, better voter registration, and stronger safeguards against fraud, and it did so with bipartisan support. In a resurfaced clip from that era, Carter is heard making the case for voter ID in terms today's Democrats would call bigoted.
"Also have some form of photo ID required, voter ID," Carter said. "So, the second reason is to make a uniform recommendation in our country through this report that we've issued, so that there's not highly discriminatory laws passed by one party or another."
Carter went further, explaining exactly how the commission designed the policy to prevent the very harms Democrats now claim are inevitable.
"These photo ID cards will be free," Carter said. "There will be a wide distribution of them. The states will be required to go around the state to issue these photo ID cards to as many people as possible, which will be a good system just for recruiting new voters."
Carter argued the policy would expand voting, not restrict it. "This will not restrict people from voting. It will be uniformly applied throughout the country, and it will be non-discriminatory," he said.
Jimmy Carter in 2005 on voter ID: "It will not restrict people from voting."
— Jenn Pellegrino 🇺🇸 (@JennPellegrino) August 6, 2026
He even described Voter ID as “a move forward in getting more people to vote."
Republicans need to share this video far and wide. Voter ID was bipartisan then. It should be bipartisan now. pic.twitter.com/szZarfscjw
Free. Widely distributed. Applied the same way to everyone. That was the standard Jimmy Carter set two decades ago for how voter ID should work, and it's exactly the kind of proposal Democrats now smear as an attack on black voters.
It doesn’t matter what form Voter ID takes; Democrats don’t want it.
If the man Democrats spent decades canonizing thought voter ID was a reasonable, non-discriminatory safeguard for elections, then there's no principled reason today's Democrats in Washington can't say the same thing.
If Jimmy Carter could support voter ID, so can they. They just don't want to. Now ask yourself why.
Editor's Note: The Democrats are doing everything in their power to undermine the integrity of our elections.
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