Regarding LWV's Jonah Wheeler Event

An Open Letter to the Peterborough, NH League of Women Voters

Postscript: The following letter was sent on March 27, 2025, to the League of Women Voters and the local press in New Hampshire. The New Hampshire Journal published a story yesterday evening regarding our letter, which can be read here.

Dear Members of the Peterborough League of Women Voters,

We, the undersigned representatives of organizations supporting State Representative Jonah Wheeler (D-Peterborough), write to formally challenge the neutrality, integrity, and competence of your organization in its handling of the listening session held on March 25, 2025, at the Peterborough Town Library. As sponsors of this hybrid in-person and Zoom forum, you were tasked with fostering a community dialogue with Representative Wheeler and Representative Peter Leishman. Instead, your bias, inadequate preparation, and failure to ensure safety turned it into a chaotic ambush that silenced Wheeler’s voice, deepened divides, and betrayed public trust. We stand behind Rep. Wheeler’s balanced stance on House Bill 148—respecting transgender individuals while addressing women’s concerns about shared spaces—and expected a respectful, open discussion, not a circus.

Representative Jonah Wheeler, New Hampshire. On X @jonahowheeler

Our concerns crystallized when your leadership revealed its agenda. In a conversation directly with our colleague Cori Cohn, which others among us overheard in the hall, you explicitly stated that the League wants Jonah Wheeler out of office. When pressed on whether this public stance conflicts with your role as a neutral host, you shrugged it off—a dismissive act that exposes your intent. This bias was compounded by your misrepresentation of the event. You originally advertised it as a listening session, a chance for constituents to engage, but changed it without notice to include Dan Gross of the Peterborough Democratic Executive Committee. This unannounced change turned a dialogue into a shaming session and debate, ambushing Wheeler and misleading attendees, aligning with your goal to unseat him and rendering your nonpartisan claim hollow.

The event on March 25 was a disaster under your watch. In a room of about 200, Wheeler, a 22-year-old Black legislator, faced shouted accusations of “traitor” and “fascist” from a predominantly white, progressive crowd. Worse, it was clear that many of these angry voices belonged to people he knows and who know him —neighbors, not strangers. Rather than helping to foster understanding between Wheeler and his community, you widened the rift, letting personal attacks spiral unchecked. Karen Hill escalated the rhetoric, baselessly tying his HB 148 vote to a “racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic agenda” and “Project 2025,” while Gross read a prepared statement expressing “deep concern and disapproval” over Wheeler and Leishman’s votes. Your moderation was nonexistent—you let detractors dominate, leaving Wheeler and his supporters sidelined. The room became unsafe: you allowed late arrivals—angry, agitated non-supporters—to stand and block doorways, cutting off emergency exits. These latecomers, without available seats, should have been sent to an overflow room with Zoom access, but you didn’t prepare for the crowd you knew was coming. This was reckless.

The Zoom failure magnified your incompetence. Hackers flooded the feed with pornographic racist and bestiality images, music, and noise, disrupting Wheeler’s remarks. Your failure to secure the platform with basic measures—muting participants or requiring authentication—was inexcusable, and when it crashed, you abandoned it. This forced Wheeler’s supporters to livestream on X, where, from our account alone, 3.7 thousand viewers tuned in. Had you managed the Zoom properly, thousands more—many from New Hampshire—would have joined, revealing how much support for Wheeler there is that is too intimidated to appear publicly. Your mismanagement hid the breadth of his backing, leaving remote attendees alienated and the event’s chaos unchecked.

These failures suggest more than negligence—they point to intent. By framing it as a Wheeler-Leishman session, then adding Gross without transparency, you set a trap rather than opened a forum. Your shrug at our conflict-of-interest query dismissed accountability, and your lack of preparation—ignoring crowd size, safety, and Zoom security—amplified the disorder. Wheeler’s record speaks for itself: 55.8% in the 2024 primary against a challenger targeting his votes on gender, and 64.4% in the general, proving his district values his nuance. Yet, you engineered an event that buried this mandate, turned friends into foes, and left attendees feeling unsafe and uninformed.

We demand answers: How do you justify stating you want Wheeler out while posing as impartial? Why did you change the event to include Gross and Hill without notice, turning it into an attack? How can you reconcile this with LWV’s mission of nonpartisan engagement when you failed to prepare, secure, or moderate—and widened rifts instead of healing them? The March 25 event was a betrayal of trust and a squandered chance for dialogue.

We call on the League of Women Voters (LWV) to commit to the following changes for the next listening session:

1. Secure Zoom Access: LWV must provide a reliable Zoom option, backed by technical support and a contingency Zoom link, to prevent recurring cybersecurity breaches that excluded hundreds, if not thousands, of New Hampshire residents from remote participation at the last meeting.

2. Ensure Attendee Safety: LWV must mandate seated attendance, keep all exits unobstructed, and prearrange overflow rooms with Zoom access to address the overcrowding and blocked doorways that compromised safety at the previous event.

3. Safeguard Journalists: LWV must designate seating for journalists and immediately remove anyone who disrupts their work, following an incident where a journalist’s notebook was searched, undermining the press freedom critical to democracy.

4. Promote Fair Dialogue: LWV must appoint an impartial moderation team (we are prepared to recommend candidates) and allow Representatives Wheeler and Leishman each to invite one guest speaker, countering the biased moderation and opaque inclusion of political adversaries that turned the last session into an ambush.

Sincerely,

Jamie Reed, Co-Executive Director, LGB Courage Coalition

Lauren Leggieri, Co-Executive Director, LGB Courage Coalition

Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender