Remember When: The President Who Spent His Life After the White House Protecting Everyone Else's Vote

On October 1, 1924, a peanut farmer's son was born in Plains, Georgia. Jimmy Carter would become the 39th President of the United States. By the time he died in December 2024 at age 100, most historians agreed his most important work happened after he lost the job.

Carter lost his re-election bid in 1980 and left Washington. He did not spend the next four decades disputing that loss. He built The Carter Center and turned it into the world's leading nonpartisan election monitor, sending teams to observe more than 100 elections in dozens of countries to make sure votes were counted honestly and results were honored. He believed a free and fair election was the foundation everything else in a democracy rests on, and he spent his post-presidency defending that foundation, one county at a time.

He also built homes with Habitat for Humanity into his nineties. He taught Sunday school in his hometown church nearly every week for decades, and strangers flew across the country just to sit in on the lesson. He won a Nobel Peace Prize for his human rights work, not for anything he did in office.

Leading Ladies Vote exists because free and fair elections do not defend themselves. Someone has to show up for them, election after election, the way Carter did for forty years. Our vote is our power.