A Message from LWV Chicago President Jane Ruby
Following are LWV Chicago President Jane Ruby’s remarks at LWV Chicago’s 2026 Annual Meeting, held June 6.
Fellow Leaguers and Friends,
I want to thank each and every one of you for all you have given to this organization over the past year: your membership, your time, your energy, your patience, your insight.
The work you do matters. Because democracy is a living, breathing thing. And we work to support it. We repair it. We teach it. We defend it. We make it visible and accessible for people who have too often been told, in direct and indirect ways, that government is not for them.
Over the past year, the Chicago League has done that work in every corner of our mission: voter registration, voter education, election protection, civic education, advocacy, public accountability, and community partnership.
This year saw us continue our efforts around new citizen voter registration—it really is some of our most incredible work. With generous support from the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, our volunteers continued to register new citizens after naturalization ceremonies, helping people take the next step from citizenship on paper to citizenship in practice—all in the face of mounting pressure from federal authorities. The work required to register those thousands upon thousands of new voters isn’t glamorous. But in a very real sense, it is sacred civic work. It is one of the clearest expressions of our mission: empowering voters and defending democracy.
This year also saw us expand our voter registration and education work in other venues. Through our partnership with the Greater Chicago Food Depository and the Cook County League, we began bringing nonpartisan voter registration and civic education to food access partner locations, including pantry sites and other community spaces.
This year, we also protected voters directly at the polls, as our Election Protection work grew in both scope and seriousness. We launched the PeaceKeeper Program to help ensure that polling places remain safe, calm, welcoming, and free from intimidation. During the March primary election, our trained volunteers monitored 98 polling places across Chicago, with a strong presence on the South Side and in communities where barriers to voting have historically been most acute. That work mattered even more because voters were operating in a climate of fear. Our volunteers helped ensure that eligible voters could cast their ballots without confusion, harassment, or intimidation. That is what election protection means. It is not abstract. It is not theoretical. It is standing beside the process so that voters can stand in their power.
Our educational programming this year was just as wide-ranging and powerful. We held talks and forums on artificial intelligence and democracy, voter suppression, election integrity, vote by mail, ranked choice voting, the Electoral College, the Constitution, judicial independence, and ethics reform. We continued to use our Chicago in Focus and Democracy 101 programming to help members and the public understand not only what is happening, but why it matters.
We also responded to the needs of this moment through Know Your Rights and Protest Safety education. At a time when immigrants, students, workers, and peaceful protesters are being made to feel vulnerable in their own communities, we helped provide practical, trustworthy information.
When the courts are under pressure, when government transparency is treated as optional, when misinformation spreads faster than the truth, the League must be there with facts, context, and courage.
And we were.
Our advocacy this year also made a real impact.
One of the proudest achievements of the year were the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. Young Voter Empowerment Law statewide & the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson Sr. Protecting Democracy Ordinance citywide. Reverend Jackson often spoke of young people crossing the graduation stage with a diploma in one hand and a voter registration card in the other. This year, together with partners, advocates, legislators, and more, we helped move that vision through the Illinois General Assembly and Chicago City Council. These were far more than one-off legislative wins; they represent a generational investment in democracy that will pay dividends for future voters.
We also raised our voices for the Equal Rights Amendment, for ranked choice voting, for vote by mail, for environmental justice, for immigrant rights, for stronger local accountability, for survivors of gender-based violence, for democracy reform, and for the basic principle that government must be honest, accessible, and answerable to the people.
We honored the women who built the path before us. We mourned political leaders like Barbara Flynn Currie and Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr., not as figures of the past alone, but as teachers whose example still instructs us. And we also mourned Leaguers who devoted time to our organizations work, like Marcia Dillon and (again!) Barbara Flynn Currie.
All of this work has required not only programs and partnerships, but people—our voter service volunteers, our civic engagement leaders, our Observer Corps, our communications team. Our board, our committee chairs, our unit leaders, our interns, our event organizers, our registrars, our moderators, our poll monitors, our members who forward the emails, make the calls, show up in the rain, submit the witness slips, bring friends to events, and remind one another that despair is not a strategy.
The League is more than one person. It is more than a board. It is not one program. It is a living civic organism, made strong by many hands and many convictions, animated by the belief that democracy is something we do together or not at all.
And that brings me to the deeper question underneath all of this work.
Democracy is not only an inheritance. It is a responsibility.
Yet there is a fundamental limitation of democracy, and indeed in all forms of human government, that only the living can participate in decision-making. The dead generations and those yet to come have no voice in the political process. Our descendants can’t vote, which makes them a relatively powerless constituency. As a result, we the living often find it all too easy to rob our future inheritors.
That tendency is married to one of the tragic realities of human nature: that we habitually abdicate long-term thinking in favor of short-term convenience. We want to outsource our problems to someone else—to other people, or even to machines. That desire has led to untold tragedies in ages past, yet its allure endures even now.
The American republic, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principles of democratic government, has stood for 250 years. Yet I suspect most of us here today can feel the mounting pressure on our civil society, and can see the spreading cracks in the institutions that underpin it.
Yet as bleak as the world may seem at times, I am hopeful for the future. I am hopeful because of all of you.
In this new era of authoritarian backsliding, with democratic freedoms and civil liberties under attack on all sides, the League of Women Voters has never been more vital.
The League is one of the few civic organizations that actually understands the long game; we understand the importance of fighting for our posterity so that they too may enjoy the rights and freedoms that our nation’s founders held to be self-evident and unalienable.
The League has been fighting for democracy and accountable government for more than a century—literally generations of people who committed themselves to bettering our nation. We are the inheritors of that sacred trust, and it is our duty to ensure that our democracy does not crumble in the face of adversity.
I have faith that, together, we will weather the present storm. Because I have faith in all of you. Thank you for putting your trust in me, and for giving your time and energy into this organization we all love.