Hi, this is Chris Hubs.

I don’t know why you’re listening to this, but since you are, let’s talk about elections.

The midterm election in the U.S.

is only about three weeks away, and you can’t miss it if you ever turn a TV or a radio on here.

I don’t watch a lot of live TV, but I still love to watch my sporting events, and every commercial break in the sporting event seems to be this political ad and that political ad, and they’re just loud and ugly and a mess.

I don’t really want to get into that and make this a very political post.

I have specific opinions, and I just don’t want to turn this podcast into that.

But I do want to think about my experience with elections.

Two years ago, I actually served as a poll worker during the general election in my county in a town nearby.

I signed up and took the training from the county auditor and went through all the work.

And I’ll tell you what, that is a long day of being a poll official.

In Iowa, the polls open at 7 in the morning and don’t close until, I think, 8 p.m.

And you are required to work the entire shift.

And not only are you there the entire shift, but you start early at like an hour beforehand setting up, making sure everything is set.

And after it’s done, you close up and you have to pack up all the materials and report the results and take the ballots and the equipment back to the county when you’re done.

It is a long and tiring day.

It was a good experience for me to see how elections are run and how safeguards around balloting are put into place.

With the number of provisions that Iowa has and the amount of steps that are taken at the polling place to ensure that the right ballot is given to a person, that they have one vote, that that ballot is collected and captured and read correctly, I have great confidence in my mind that the actual integrity of votes as they are collected and counted within the county and the state is very high.

There’s not an obvious way for votes to be manufactured or tampered with in some other way.

And actually, I think that’s one of the strengths of the voting system across the United States.

Such as it is, is because it’s decentralized and because the rules and systems are run by individual towns, cities, municipalities, counties, however the states have it organized, you have a lot of very normal people who take their job very seriously, working in very practical ways to ensure that the right people get to vote and only the right people get to vote.

And more importantly, that all those votes are collected and counted and reported with integrity.

My dad, for many years, worked for a very small township in rural Wisconsin and was responsible for running elections there.

And I’ll tell you, it was a lot of work for him too, maintaining the rolls, finding people to work the polling place on election days, collecting all the information, getting it reported to the county.

Again, a job he took very seriously and was always looking to ensure that he could comply with all of the rules, all sorts of little things.

Well, they’re not even little things.

Things like accessibility, things like notice, proper posting, all of those, and then that it could be done efficiently and well and in the right timing.

A lot of work, but important for the functioning of our government.

I haven’t signed up to be a poll worker again since the 2024 election, and I don’t know if I will.

It was a good experience to see and learn, and also something I’m not sure I want to do every cycle.

I expect my engagement with the 2026 election is going to be to show up at my polling place on election day and cast my own ballot, and I would encourage you to find your polling place and vote as well.

We’ll talk later.