Jimmy Carter has voted in presidential election, representatives confirm

Jimmy Carter, the centenarian former Democratic president, has voted in the 2024 presidential election, his representatives confirmed on Wednesday.

A statement from the Carter Center did not reveal who he voted for, but it is assumed the 100-year-old, who is in hospice care, cast his ballot for the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.

“He’s never voted Republican in his life,” his son, Chip, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, after revealing in August that Carter’s greatest wish, more than reaching his 100th birthday, was to live long enough to support her.

“I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris,” he said at the time.

At the Democratic national convention in August, just weeks before Carter’s 1 October birthday, his grandson Jason, the Carter Center chair, told delegates that the former president believed Harris “carries my grandfather’s legacy”.

The statement issued on Wednesday at lunchtime was brief: “The Carter Center can confirm that former US President Jimmy Carter voted by mail today, Oct 16, 2024. We do not have any further details to share at this time.”

Some media outlets earlier reported falsely that Carter, whose single term of office was 1977 to 1981, had already voted on Tuesday’s first day of early voting in Georgia.

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The Journal Constitution, confirming the correct details on Wednesday, said Carter filled out his ballot and it was placed in a drop box at the Sumter county courthouse near his hometown of Plains this morning.

Carter has been “an especially reliable voter” over the years, the New York Times reported on Wednesday. The newspaper said he had routinely cast ballots in general elections as well as primary runoffs and special elections. For more than a decade, he has voted exclusively by mail in elections tracked by the state, it said.

According to Jason Carter, his grandfather, the 39th US president, was in August “more alert and interested in politics and the war in Gaza”. He has been in hospice care since February 2023, nine months before the death of his wife, the former first lady Rosalynn Carter.

The move was widely believed to be an indication that Carter was nearing the end of his life, a perception reinforced by his decision to ask Joe Biden to deliver his eulogy the following month.

Biden then suggested he might have provided that information unintentionally, telling reporters: “Excuse me, I shouldn’t say that,” before adding Carter’s medical team had “found a way to keep him going for a lot longer than they anticipated”.

The ultimate elder statesman of US politics, Carter became the first president in history to reach 100 years old, a milestone celebrated a couple of weeks before his birthday at a star-studded party in Atlanta.

“Not everyone gets 100 years. But when someone does and uses that time to good, it’s worth celebrating,” Jason Carter, the 2014 Democratic nominee for Georgia governor, said.

After losing to the Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election and leaving the White House, Carter dedicated himself to diplomacy, and was regularly provided counsel to subsequent presidents dealing with international crises.

He was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2002 “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development”.

He founded the Carter Center in 1982 with the intention it become a leading advocate for advancing human rights globally and alleviating famine, poverty and suffering.