This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Mark Liebovich, a staff writer at the Atlantic, where I cover

politics and with me is my colleague Tim Alberta, who is also a staff writer at the Atlantic.

Tim, how you doing? Mark, I am okay. How are you? Good. Situate yourself in this time-space continuum.

You were sitting on Michigan, I believe. That's correct. The center of the political universe.

I've got the fall festive gear with the flannel and the vest, although it's been

unseasonably balmy in Michigan this week, so the vest is really more seasonal than anything.

I'm going to have to strip it off once I go outside. All right, well now that we've

loosened each other and everyone up with our witty repartee, we can get to the topic at hand,

which is that the 2022 midterms are only days away. But for this episode, we're going to focus

on the underappreciated part of every election, which is the election administrators that run them.

That's correct. And this is an area that Tim has done some extremely great reporting and deep

dives into, particularly in Michigan, which is not only a hotly contested swing state, but also

a focal point of where the country is and the tipping points that are affecting a lot of elections.

So what I would ask off the top, Tim, is election workers. This is usually kind of the plumbing

of elections. We as political reporters tend to focus on the campaigns themselves. What was it

that got you interested in election workers themselves and wanting to talk to them and learn

more about them? Election administration folks are a little bit like offensive linemen. You

don't really notice them until they do something wrong. And oftentimes when they do something wrong,

there are big and devastating consequences. So here we are looking ahead to the midterms next

week. And we're already seeing accusations of voter fraud and enormous pressure being put on

the system. And I think to understand where the system is right now and just how bad things could

get, I think we need to rewind back to a couple of recent elections. So you know, the first major

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