Democrat state attorneys general are suing right now to block voter ID requirements Trump ordered this year.
A buried 2005 federal report just resurfaced with the exact words a Democrat president used to demand it.
Jimmy Carter put his name on the very policy Democrats now call racist.
Carter Told Americans Voter ID Was Nothing Like Jim Crow
In 2005, Jimmy Carter co-chaired the Commission on Federal Election Reform with former Secretary of State James Baker.
The commission's final report told states to require photo identification at the polls.
It called for a national standard built on the REAL ID card – full legal name, date of birth, photograph, and signature.
Carter did not treat this as some grudging compromise.
He said the ID requirement should be "uniformly applied" and "non-discriminatory," and insisted the cards be free and widely distributed.
Carter went further, arguing the policy was actually "a move forward in getting more people to vote," not a way to suppress them.
The report itself put it in terms even Carter's own party couldn't spin today: photo IDs were already needed to board a plane, enter a federal building, or cash a check, so why not to cast a ballot.
That is not a Fox News talking point.
That is Jimmy Carter, a Democrat president, on the record, in a bipartisan federal report with his name on the cover.
Every Democrat Who Now Fights Voter ID Once Stood Where Carter Stood
Carter is not the only Democrat this trick has been played on.
Stacey Abrams spent years comparing voter ID to Jim Crow, then quietly signaled she'd back a voting bill that included one anyway.
The Washington Post covered it by inventing a new word – Abrams didn't flip-flop, she "evolved."
Senator Raphael Warnock tried the same move, claiming afterward he'd never really opposed voter ID at all.
Fox News host Greg Gutfeld put it plainly: Democrats spent so long screaming "racist" at a common-sense law that they painted themselves into a corner with no way out but revisionism.
North Carolina's Democrat governor and attorney general refused to even defend their own state's voter ID law in court, forcing Republican legislators to step in – and the Supreme Court sided with the legislators 8-1.
Justice Neil Gorsuch's opinion made clear that state officials do not get to sabotage a law they dislike by throwing the legal fight.
The Democrats Who Cry Racism Are Fighting Jimmy Carter's Own Policy
The thing that fires me up most about this story is that Democrats aren't fighting a Republican idea – they're fighting Jimmy Carter's idea, and pretending they never knew it existed.
This isn't a one-off gaffe some staffer will walk back tomorrow.
It's a pattern that runs from Carter in 2005 to Abrams and Warnock in 2021 to blue-state attorneys general suing Trump in 2026, and every single time the label "racist" gets slapped on the exact same policy the moment a Republican picks it back up.
Carter and Baker built that 2005 report specifically to survive Republican and Democrat administrations alike, and for two decades Democrats buried it rather than admit their own guy signed off on requiring ID to vote.
Watch what happens next: expect Democrat officials to either go silent on the Carter report or invent a new "evolution" story, because the alternative is admitting they've spent twenty years lying to their own voters about what their party used to believe.
Sources:
- Craig Bannister, "Jimmy Carter Supported Bipartisan Voter ID Requirement in 2005 Election Report," NewsBusters, August 7, 2026.
- Matt Margolis, "Democrats Don't Want You to Know What Jimmy Carter Said About Voter ID," PJ Media, August 7, 2026.
- The Daily Signal Staff, "7 Ways the 2005 Carter-Baker Report Could Have Averted Problems With 2020 Election," The Daily Signal, November 20, 2020.
- Hans von Spakovsky, "This Supreme Court Ruling Will Prove Vital to Defending Voter ID and Other Laws," The Heritage Foundation, June 29, 2022.
- Fox News Staff, "'The Five' Calls Out WaPo for Whitewashing Stacey Abrams Voter ID Reversal: Dems 'Evolve,' Republicans 'Cave,'" Fox News, June 22, 2021.
