I believe in secure, transparent elections. Every legal vote must count, and every illegal vote cancels out a legal one. Preventing fraud and protecting eligible voters are both non-negotiable to me. That is not a partisan position. It is a fundamental fairness issue, and I take it seriously.
I also believe that protecting election integrity means protecting every eligible citizen’s ability to vote, including people who have been voting their entire adult lives and deserve to keep doing so without running into unnecessary barriers.
When I have raised concerns about certain voter verification proposals, I was thinking about people like my own parents. They were born and raised before the internet age, in a time when documentation was not digitized, standardized, or easy to retrieve. Many older Marylanders, particularly women who changed their names at marriage decades ago, face real and practical obstacles to obtaining the documents some proposals require. For some people, those records are simply not accessible in any straightforward way. That is not a hypothetical. It is the lived reality of families right here in Cecil County.
Protecting elections means making sure that a lifelong Cecil County voter is not turned away because of a paperwork barrier that has nothing to do with whether they are a legal citizen. It means finding solutions that are both secure and accessible for the real people who live in our communities.
I will always support measures that genuinely strengthen election security. I will also always push back when implementation approaches could create unnecessary hardship for the very neighbors we are trying to serve. Those two commitments are not in conflict. They are both rooted in the same thing: respect for every legal voter in Cecil County.
Secure elections and accessible voting for eligible citizens are not opposites. A representative who truly understands Cecil County knows that.
Have a question about where I stand on this or any other issue? Reach out directly or come find me at an upcoming event. I show up, and I answer questions.