By Kate Sullivan
Last evening, the League of Women Voters hosted a forum titled, “How Secure is Your Vote?” — but let’s not pretend it was anything close to a fair or informative public event. The audience wasn’t there to engage. We were there to be talked at, talked over, and ultimately forced to swallow a series of unchallenged political talking points with no opportunity for meaningful push back. Chat disabled. Questions screened. Participation denied.
It was intellectual waterboarding disguised as civic education.
Mail-Ins Are Secure — Because They Say So
The panel spent most of the night insisting that mail-in voting is unquestionably secure. Evidence? None provided. Data? Not offered. The audience was simply expected to accept their conclusion because they said it slowly and confidently enough.
Voter ID “Disenfranchises” — Settled by Groupthink
With equal certainty, every speaker seemed to agree voter ID laws are inherently disenfranchising — especially for Black voters — as if this were an empirical fact beyond debate. No current studies cited. No dissent allowed. Just recycled talking points treated as holy scripture.
Maryland: The “Gold Standard” (Sure. Okay Jan.)
Perhaps the most breathless claim was that Maryland elections represent the “gold standard for election security.” A claim like that demands proof — none was offered. The audience was again expected to nod along politely and ignore the mountain of evidence suggesting otherwise – which includes a national story about a non-citizen found on the Maryland voter rolls and a DOJ investigation the SBOE has yet to credibly resolve.
Their Crown Jewel of Hypocrisy
But the highlight — or lowlight — came when one speaker dismissed Trump’s Election Integrity Executive Order as “basically a glorified press release with no authority to enact.”
This from the same crowd that treated Biden’s Executive Order 14019 — a sweeping directive instructing federal agencies to expand mail-in voting — as Holy Writ. That order fundamentally changed how we vote. They championed it, defended it, and quoted it endlessly.
Ironically, Trump’s EO was designed to undo Biden’s unlawful overreach.
Exactly do these same people justify celebrating Biden’s EO while dismissing Trump’s as “unlawful”? Executive orders don’t gain or lose legitimacy based on who signs them — unless, of course, you’re making arguments first and finding principles later.
A Forum That Feared Its Own Audience
The biggest tell of the night wasn’t what they said — it was what they refused to allow. No debate. No scrutiny. No accountability. The League of Women Voters has a long history of masquerading as a non-partisan defender of “voting rights,” but their single-minded obsession with access over everything else has long eclipsed any concern for actual security.
In that light, the title of their event, “How Secure is Your Vote?”, becomes an ironic twist — a question they have no intention of answering because the truth undermines their agenda. Their goal wasn’t to inform; it was to groom, lull, and subdue the audience into believing that weaker safeguards somehow produce stronger elections. They know those claims collapse under real questioning. And that, more than anything, is why they had to keep the audience silent.
