Stopping the Steal—in 1962

This election is rigged. That was the word that Jimmy Carter got by phone. A message that became his obsession. One that changed his life.

It was Election Day, 1962. Carter was a 38-year-old Georgia peanut farmer and chairman of the Sumter County School Board. He was running in a Democratic primary for a new seat in the Georgia State Senate, hopeful that voters in Southwest Georgia would select him to represent them in Atlanta.

The supporter who telephoned Carter had few details other than that something troubling was underway with the votes in Quitman County. So Carter rushed to the courthouse to investigate.

The first thing he noticed was that there weren’t any voting booths. Instead, tables were out in the open. Ballots were stacked on them. Next to them were some campaign cards. When Carter got closer, he saw that they were promoting his opponent, Homer Moore. There was Homer’s smiling visage, splashed on the cover.

Carter watched as voters requested ballots. A man would scrunch up next to them as he handed them over. He would point to Homer’s picture, “This is a good man, and my friend.”

That was the Quitman County’s political boss, Joe Hurst. And he was overseeing this election. Hurst controlled everything in that county. For example, his wife ran the county’s welfare system, so Joe made the state welfare department send recipients’ checks to them direct. That way he could distribute the money himself. Joe Hurst didn’t want any ambiguity about who had sway.

He was planning to build a new subdivision on nearby Lake Eufaula (which was renamed the Walter F. George Lake in 1963) and knew that Homer Moore would help. Jimmy Carter—well, he was running on a clean government platform. Jimmy might not be supportive of how they did things down in Quitman County, Hurst concluded.

“Where are the voting booths?” Carter asked.

“This is just a simple election for one office that we’ve decided they’re not necessary today,” Hurst said.

“The law requires that people vote in secret and you’re watching everyone,” Carter said.

“People don’t mind if we know what they do,” Hurst said.

Exasperated, Carter left the courthouse.

Later that night, as the returns started flowing in, Carter was ahead by 70 votes. Quitman County remained to be counted but if the trend continued, Carter would prevail. Soon, Quitman County officials reported their totals. Jimmy lost.

When Carter tried to tell a reporter the story of what he’d witnessed on Election Day, the reporter said it wasn’t newsworthy. “He was not interested in writing any story critical of election procedure in Quitman County,” Carter recalled. Later, Jimmy discovered that the reporter and Joe Hurst were buddies.

The results from that election night haunted Jimmy. He grew depressed and lost weight. He had to do something to address this gross injustice. As Carter aide Peter Bourne told me, “Jimmy couldn’t live with himself.” He decided to contest the election but was fearful of being branded a sore loser.

As former President Jimmy Carter turns 100 this week, media coverage is portraying him as a righteous chief executive. His biographer, Kai Bird, author of The Outlierasserts that Carter led a scandal-free presidency and read 200 pages of memoranda daily. On October 1, President Joe Biden declared that Carter is “a moral force for a nation and the world.” And, in a recent New York Times piece, ex-Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter says Carter is “the ultimate un-Trump.” (For perspective, Alter also says that Donald Trump is “the most dangerous threat to democracy in American history.”)

Typical of how Jimmy is being celebrated was captured by someone I follow on Instagram. He posted images of Carter as photographed by Andy Warhol and wrote, “Quiet-spoken and humble, two qualities that didn’t play against the rough-and-tumble of politics… Jimmy Carter was the exemplar of the American value of service to others: putting your own interests second, helping the less fortunate, providing welcome to the stranger, fighting for justice for those who have learned not to expect it.”

All are missing Carter’s essence—the indispensable element that it took for Jimmy to get from the Governor’s Mansion in Georgia to “higher office,” which was the euphemism that Carter aide Hamilton Jordan and others would use when they approached Jimmy and whispered about their unique plan to get him in the White House.

It is the quality that Hunter Thompson identified when he put Jimmy Carter in league with Muhammad Ali and Hells Angels leader Sonny Barger. “A sheer functional meanness, meaning the ability to get from A to B to C, M, Z—whatever you want,” Thompson said. “He would cut both your legs off to carry a ward in the Bronx and never apologize for it. He understands the system.”

Jimmy had two secret weapons—Hamilton Jordan and another Georgian, Jody Powell. Both came to him saying they wanted to be a part of his campaign, asking, How can we help?

In strokes of brilliance, Carter helped Jordan get a job at the Democratic National Committee up in Washington. This was to develop a network to help Carter line up political staffers, become well-versed with how the party worked, understand how the nomination unfolded. “It allowed Jordan to keep Carter constantly informed about what was going on at the DNC,” Bourne said.

Carter’s next genius move was to travel the country with Powell and campaign for Democratic congressional candidates leading up to the 1974 elections. “In many instances Carter went to some obscure districts,” Bourne recalled. “A lot of these people won because of Carter, and they were all very indebted. So, when Jimmy was running for president, he could immediately call them and say, ‘Can your people who helped you get elected help me in my campaign for president?’ Nobody had thought of this strategically in this way before.”

Carter’s trajectory was stunning, especially for Southerners. Even as a little boy growing up in North Carolina at the time, I seemed to understand how remarkable he was. As the Texan author Larry K. Ling wrote in Esquire in 1976, “If you wanted to become much more than justice of the peace in Deep Gritsville, then you puckered up your lips and bought a bus ticket north and some mouthwash for afterward. So they sat back and waited for Carter to come around with his hand out, begging Gimme gimme/My name’s Jimmy. They’re still waiting, cousin.” Years later as an adult, after being around Washington for a while, I realized that Larry was telling the truth.

When Carter accepted his party’s nomination at the Democratic Convention in New York City, he declared that “too many have had to suffer at the hands of a political and economic elite who have shaped decisions and never had to account for mistakes nor to suffer from injustice.” In response, news coverage blasted Carter as a populist demagogue.

The political reporters who were on the trail with Carter downplayed this insurgency and instead focused on the horserace. During one session of the infamous interview that Carter gave to Playboy, which was conducted on the campaign plane, Jimmy said, “The national news media have no interest in issues at all. What they’re looking for is a 47-second argument between me and another candidate or something like that. There’s nobody in the back of this plane who would ask an issue question unless he thought he could trick me into some crazy statement.” But voters still heard the signal and elected Jimmy in what his mother Miss Lillian called “the greatest miracle that ever happened.”

When writers such as Bird, Alter, and others chart the demise of Carter’s presidency, they focus on the “misery index” of the late-1970s, Islamic radicals who took Americans hostage in Iran, the Soviets invading Afghanistan—all were important factors. But they miss the seeds of Jimmy’s ultimate defeat, which were planted during the transition to the presidency in late 1976 when the president-elect staffed his administration.

As Jimmy’s longtime aide Greg Schneiders admitted to me a few years ago, “Hamilton Jordan said that if people like Cy Vance and Zbig Brzezinski are in our administration, I’m going to quit. That captured it pretty well which was, This was all about insurgency. This was about taking on the establishment. And if we end up with an establishment cabinet and administration then we will have lost. And to a large degree that’s what happened.”

Bourne told me that when he was first getting acquainted with Carter in the early 1970s, he was convinced that somewhere in Jimmy’s background there were a bunch of gray-haired old men whom he consulted with all the time. “I discovered that the only person in that category was a man called Charles Kirbo but there were no others. Everybody else were people who’d been loyal to him back to his first gubernatorial campaign in 1966. They were not politically experienced people. The competent, experienced people were not loyal to him.”

The “malaise” of 1980 wore Jimmy down, like it did the rest of us. He seemed to try everything to reverse the feeling of dread, including when he stopped parting his hair on the right and started parting it on the left. Nothing seemed to work. The famous grin transformed into what we call in the South a “shit-eating grin.” As Roy Blount once wrote of Jimmy’s signature expression, “I guess you know what that is. If you have ever seen a dog eating some. A dog is a noble animal in many ways, but it will eat shit sometimes, when it finds some appealing…. It has this sort of mean shame to it. It has the courage, and pure pleasure, of mean shame. White folks in the South have had to eat a lot of shit.”

That indignity of 1980—it no doubt reminded Jimmy of the year he decided to contest the election in Georgia. Even after his presidency he said that he couldn’t remember any other time when he felt more out of place or when his efforts seemed more fruitless than 1962.

In the end, Jimmy’s election contest was right. The system and the votes were rigged against him. But Georgia’s election law was abysmal and anyone who objected couldn’t demand more than a basic recount of ballots.

There were 433 ballots in that old box in Quitman County. And, as Jimmy put it, “according to the names listed, 126 of these voted alphabetically! When the ballots were unfolded, there were sometimes four to eight of them folded together.”

Carter and a lawyer sought out witnesses; they collected affidavits swearing to the corruption. Jimmy said people threatened to kill him if he continued, and that party thugs t ried intimidating his sources.

The contest consumed him. “I almost memorized the Georgia election code, and it seemed obvious that almost every section of it had been violated,” he wrote in Why Not the Best?, published in 1976.

In the end, Carter found a lawyer who would help: Charles Kirbo of Atlanta, who was then a spry 45. He got a judge to listen to them and review their evidence, including that there were more ballots counted than issued. The judge ruled that the primary election was fraudulent. And he declared Jimmy Carter the winner.

But the Democratic Party machine appealed the judge’s decision, and the local Democratic executive committee made Moore the winner instead.

Kirbo tracked the state Democratic Party chairman, J.B. Fuqua, all the way to Canada where he was on a hunting trip. A soft-drink manufacturer who also owned a TV station in Augusta, Georgia, Fuqua listened as Kirbo chronicled what Jimmy and he uncovered. Kirbo showed him the documents. After being persuaded that Jimmy’s case was solid, Fuqua had the state party’s executive committee name Carter to be the nominee. That fall, Jimmy was elected to the Georgia senate.

“The local political leader was subsequently convicted in federal court for wire fraud in an earlier election for Congress, and given a three-year suspended sentence,” Carter wrote. “Later he served time for running an illegal liquor distribution operation in Quitman County.”

So just what did Jimmy Carter learn? “I began to realize how vulnerable our political system was to an accumulation of unchallenged power,” he wrote in 1976. “Honest and courageous people could be quieted when they come to realize that outspoken opposition was fruitless. The dishonest could band together to produce and divide the spoils, and they could easily elect officials who most often seemed respectable but who would cooperate in order to gain a title or office.”

Some 23 years after Carter’s presidency ended, he studied election fraud with the likes of James A. Baker III, Lee Hamilton, and Tom Daschle. Their Commission on Federal Election Reform identified absentee ballots as at the greatest risk of election fraud. Mail-in voting, Carter and his team concluded, is the largest source of potential vote fraud.

When I interviewed Jimmy in 2015, he recognized the rise of Donald Trump and told me that there was an awakening underway in the U.S. “I don’t know how trenchant or permanent it will be,” he said. After Trump was elected president, Carter offered to go to North Korea on behalf of Trump to meet with Kim Jong Un to try to bring about peace. At first Trump seemed interested but then he passed on Carter’s offer. Later that summer, Jimmy lashed out, “There is no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the [2016] election. I think the interference, though not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. Trump lost the election and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”

After the election of 2020, Trump filed just one election contest in the U.S. It was in the state of Georgia. But he couldn’t get a judge to read it, and the contest was dismissed.

Reflecting on Jimmy’s centenary, I’m reminded of what the Democratic Representative Mo Udall of Arizona said back in 1976 after Carter defeated him for the Democratic nomination for president. “If Carter’s elected, he’ll never make Mount Rushmore because there’s not room enough for two more faces.”