FORMER US PRESIDENT Jimmy Carter has cast his ballot in the country’s presidential election.

In a statement, the Carter Centre confirmed that the former Democratic leader voted by post. 

It comes two weeks after Carter celebrated his 100th birthday on 1 October at his home in Plains, Georgia, where he has been living in hospice care since last year.

He is the first-ever former US president to reach the century mark.

Before the milestone birthday, his son Chip Carter said his father had the election very much in mind.

“He’s plugged in,” Chip Carter told the Associated Press. “I asked him two months ago if he was trying to live to be 100, and he said, ‘No, I’m trying to live to vote for Kamala Harris’.”

The Carter Centre’s brief statement said it had no more details to share.

Carter formed the Carter Centre in 1982 with his wife Rosalyn, with the stated aim of “improving lives by advancing democracy, resolving conflicts, and eliminating preventable diseases”.

According to the centre’s website, it has become “a leading global health and human rights organization that has positively impacted over 80 countries”.

Georgia’s registered voters have been turning out in record numbers since early voting began yesterday.

Nearly 460,000 had voted in-person or cast absentee ballots by this afternoon, secretary of state Brad Raffensperger said.

Three weeks to go

With just under three weeks to go before the election, Democratic nominee Harris is set to sit down for an interview on Fox News tonight, after Donald Trump sought to use the same network to connect with female voters wary of his record.

Harris will sit down with the conservative-leaning broadcaster in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, part of a push to reach out to wavering Republicans who have tired of Trump’s dark rhetoric.

The White House race is currently neck-and-neck, and both candidates are increasingly looking for ways to gain momentum.

Harris will be quizzed by Fox anchor Bret Baier in a show screening at 6pm (11pm Irish time), as she gambles to break the deadlock with a sortie into unfamiliar ground.

Fox News has played a key role in Trump’s political rise, and he blasted the network over the Harris interview, accusing Baier of being “very soft” and the channel of having “totally lost its way.”

He sat down with the network ahead of Harris’s appearance, in a pre-recorded town hall with an all-female audience, where the conversation turned to vitro fertilization (IVF), a fertility treatment that Democrats says is threatened by his policies.

Despite being on home turf, it was a challenging topic as women have been turned off by Trump’s statements on reproductive rights, and by his campaign more broadly.

He was cheered as he told his audience in the closely-watched swing state of Georgia that Republicans were the party championing the procedure.

“I want to talk about IVF. I’m the father of IVF, so I want to hear this question,” he said.

The Republican candidate did not explain what he meant, but his remarks were the latest in a series of conflicting stances he has taken on reproductive rights, a key weakness in his push for the White House.

With reporting from © AFP 2024