Former President Jimmy Carter (video screenshot)
Mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, inaccurate voter lists, dead people voting, barring election observers, faulty voting machines, media calling elections too early and the touting of exit polls.
These were among the issues raised 15 years ago by the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform that sound eerily familiar in 2020, reported the Daily Signal.
Known informally as the Carter-Baker Commission, the panel was led by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter and former Republican Secretary of State James Baker.
The commission was set up to address issues that arose after Democratic nominee Al Gore contested the 2000 presidential election, won by George W. Bush.
Carter-Baker Commission member Kay C. James, now the president of the Heritage Foundation, said that had Congress and state governments "adopted many of the panel's recommendations, the 2020 postelection mess between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden might have been avoided."
"So many of the problems we're now hearing about in the aftermath of the 2020 election could have been avoided had states heeded the advice of the Commission on Federal Election Reform," she said.
Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh noted the panel's recommendations on his show Monday.
"So for the last 15 years, every single elected person in the swamp has failed this country. The Democrats took this as a roadmap," he said.
"Folks, do you realize what this is? This is a road map that was written 15 years ago that was designed to specifically prevent everything that happened in the 2020 election," Limbaugh said.
"Everything they recommended was ignored. I, your host, El Rushbo, am not surprised. These things are never, ever actually followed. They’re simply. ... This is a classic illustration — we talked about it last week — of a blue-ribbon panel. Congress could have given a lot of weight to all this if they would have engaged in something other than just a report," Limbaugh said.
"If there had been some actual legislation, it could have been entitled Election Reform. But, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no! All they did was farm it out. They farmed it out to some blue-ribbon deep-staters, Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker III, and these guys came back with exactly what was wrong, how to remedy exactly what was wrong."
The report predicted what would go wrong, but not one recommendation was followed.
"In fact, one might go so far as to say that the recommendations in this report may have actually provided a road map of how to do it rather than a series of suggestions on how to prevent election problems, this might have been the road map for how to execute them, because it’s eerie," he said.
The report recommended nationwide standards for voter identification "to ensure that persons presenting themselves at the polling place are the ones on the registration list."
The panel also warned that absentee and mail-in ballots are the "largest source of potential voter fraud." It suggested the practice of allowing "candidates or party workers to pick up and deliver absentee ballots should be eliminated" entirely.
The commission concluded that states should better track registered voters who move, and election observers should have "unrestricted access" to monitor the system. Voting machines should be checked regularly for accuracy, and reporters should wait to "project" winners until all polls have closed.
Lastly, vote fraud should be prosecuted aggressively.
Limbaugh noted the panel called on states to increase voter ID requirements and be leery of mail-in voting.
"They wanted no part of mail-in voting. It's a problem, don't do it, they said. They also made the case for halting ballot harvesting. They advocated maintaining voter lists, accurate voter lists to make sure dead people were promptly removed. Now, that shouldn’t require a blue-ribbon committee to recommend that. But it did."
The panel also recommended to allow election observers to monitor ballot counting and to make sure voting machines are working properly.
"That also shouldn't require a blue-ribbon committee suggesting the voting machines work properly. But it's uncanny how everything they suggested in fact happened the opposite," he said. "This thing, it was either a gigantic and great warning of what was coming or it served as a road map. But regardless, it was prepared by the deep state. And it ended up being run by the deep state."
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