Voting In The 2026 Midterm Elections

It’s election day 2026 and I will be spending the day serving as an Elections Officer for my hometown.

Voting In The 2026 Midterm Elections

I think this will be my 4th time serving as an elections officer. The photo above is from my first time in 2024, and since then I’ve worked at two other midterms. It’s an exhausting day, but I enjoy it. To keep things light, I thought I’d share a few things that surprised me (or that I didn’t think of) about this role.

🕰️ It’s a long day. 🕰️ In Virginia polls are open from 6 am to 7 pm. We have to report to the polling place at 4:45 am and stay until the last voter leaves and all the paperwork is done (which in my experience has been @ 9 pm). We cannot leave for any reason—unless we fall ill (and then we can’t return). The law in Virginia is that everyone in line by 7:00 pm can vote, so the last voter may not leave until 7:30-ish. After that, we follow detailed, step-by-step instructions to close out the voting machines, reconcile the numbers that have to be reconciled (mainly how many ballots we handed out vs. how many ballots were counted by our machines), sign-off on various forms, and break down and pack up everything we set up for voting (tables, privacy partitions, signs, etc.).

✒️The voting machines capture images of write-in votes. 🖋️ We of course never know how a given person voted, but at the end of the day the machines generate a printout of all the votes with a tally of the results. For write-in candidates, the printout shows an image of the handwriting. Apparently voting for Mickey Mouse really is a thing, and one year someone literally wrote “anyone else”!

❤️🇺🇸 It’s a heartening scene, even if you are fed up with politics. 🇺🇸❤️ Our democracy depends on (eligible) voters exercising their right to vote, and this is where it happens. We see older people making the physical effort to vote, young parents with children in tow, 18- and 19-year olds voting for the first time, and people who never voted before finally getting around to it. We are trained to keep things apolitical and the law limits how close campaigners can be to the entrance. Once you’re in the door, everything is neutral—including our clothing (although we are permitted to wear American flag-themed clothes). Since we can’t talk about the candidates (or any other issues on the ballot) and don’t know how anyone is voting, it’s probably the best place to be on election day if you want to escape the barrage of exit-polling predictions. 🫣

I’m participating in National Blog Poasting Month. Learn more and see the list of participating bloggers here.

Have you ever served as an elections officer?