The primary for the 8th Congressional District of Massachusetts is set for Sept. 1, and the Massachusetts League of Women Voters (LWV) is hosting a political forum on Thursday, Aug. 13, at 7 p.m. at the Chapman Middle School in Weymouth.

League Member and past President Elizabeth Foster-Nolan said the idea is to get residents informed and ready for the election as much as possible.

“This is a great opportunity for people to hear from the candidates directly, and understand what they’re speaking about,” she said. “The goals of the League of Women Voters are to educate voters and defend democracy, and I think this is just a great way to get education out there about voting.”

The format of the forum will be about the same as other LWV events. Foster-Nolan said residents are able to submit questions to the League beforehand through digital means, but no questions will be answered live.

“We will have opening statements by each of the candidates, then questions posed to the candidates rotating with who starts first, and we will not be having a rebuttal,” she said. “And then they will each have an opportunity for a closing statement.”

She added that LWV is working to get the word out as far as possible into the district, and allowing comments to be submitted on as many platforms as possible.

“If people commented as we posted things online, we are taking those into consideration as well,” she said, noting that comments on most posts related to the upcoming forum will be taken into consideration, including the Facebook event page: https://gvimes.link/frmcngrss

Foster-Nolan said if you can’t make it to Weymouth, the forum will be available digitally to residents after the fact.

“WETC, our local cable access in Weymouth, will be filming this and they will have it available to us, usually the next day, and that will be distributed to folks,” she said. WETC’s on-demand library can be found at https://www.weymouth.tv

As far as the content of the forum, well, Foster-Nolan said that’s on a need-to-know basis.

“Obviously there is a broad area of questions out there and we generally don’t divulge any questions or general areas we’re discussing, just to make it fair for both candidates,” she said, but recommended residents check out Vote411.org to see a summary of all the candidates on their respective ballots and many of the issues in your area. “There are questions up there for the 8th Congressional District, and for all candidates running in Massachusetts.”

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Foster-Nolan said while the 8th District hasn’t seen a primary in a bit, the League has held several forums for members of the U.S. Senate in the past and is prepared for a forum on that level of government.

“We haven’t held a forum for or had a primary contest in the 8th for a while, and so we were very happy to hear that both the candidates agreed to do this candidates forum,” she said. “Once we got the word that they were both interested, it came together very quickly. They were both extremely responsive to us.”

Foster-Nolan said there is a lot of work to do once the candidates confirm, like organizing with the school that’s hosting the debate, figuring out the League’s questions, and getting the Weymouth TV organization ready. But she said the hosting school, Chapman Middle School in Weymouth, has a brand new auditorium with plenty of seating capacity for anyone interested in attending in-person, as it has 840 seats.

“We’re not asking people to register,” she said. “It’s a large enough auditorium. They hold their plays there, they host theater competitions there and other Town events, like their most recent mayoral inauguration.”

She added the League is dedicated to making sure that the moderator has no conflicts of interest with the candidates.

“One of the rules of the League is that you can’t have a moderator who lives in the district running the forum,” she said. “Our current co-president of the LWV of Massachusetts, Courtney Henderson, is the moderator, and she lives in Fall River, which is not in the 8th District. We believe that’s very important.”

For more information on the League, go to https://lwvma.org