The Carter-Baker Commission, which was founded in 2004, followed the typical model of modern blue-ribbon panels. It was led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, two elder statesmen who gave it a bipartisan imprimatur and political heft. But the report, released in 2005, wasn’t commissioned by Congress or the White House. It instead was organized by American University’s Center for Democracy and Election Management. Nonetheless, its conclusions have been treated by legislatures and courts with the same respect granted to official government commissions.
What drove the commission’s formation was a sharp, urgent decline in public confidence surrounding the American democratic process 20 years ago. The problem became especially apparent after the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act to correct some of the flaws that were apparent after Florida’s hanging chad meltdown two years earlier. But the commission’s leaders argued that more needed to be done, citing polls on the eve of the 2004 election that found only one-third of Americans were confident their ballot would be counted.
In the end, the report found multiple problems with HAVA’s implementation in the states, as well as scattered instances of election maladministration and persistent structural flaws in the American electoral system. The commission ultimately offered 87 recommendations. Some were fairly commonsense, like improving access for people with disabilities and developing backup plans for equipment failures on Election Day. Others were somewhat bolder for their time, like re-enfranchising most people with felony convictions after they served their sentence, as well as a rotating regional system for presidential primaries to improve participation. Because U.S. elections are so decentralized, it’s hard to tell how many jurisdictions adopted some or all of the commission’s recommendations. More than a few of its proposals are now so ubiquitous that it likely had some influence on the American election system.
But that’s not how the report is remembered today, at least not by conservatives looking for ammunition to discredit election results and restrict voting rights. The report also discussed the risk of fraud in aspects of the election system, such as duplicate voter registrations in multiple states and deceased voters on voter rolls, and called for measures like voter ID laws to restore confidence in the system. In the 2008 Supreme Court case Crawford v. Marion County, Justice John Paul Stevens favorably cited the report to justify his vote to uphold Indiana’s voter ID law, which opened the door to a wave of similar laws nationwide. Some of those laws have since been criticized for suppressing turnout in communities of color; a former Wisconsin attorney general infamously credited that state’s voter ID law for Donald Trump’s victory there in 2016.