Welcome & Ballot Basics

Amanda Benbow Lunn 0:08

Hello, friends. Welcome back to the NC Deep Dive. I'm your host, Amanda Benbow Lunn, and this episode features one of our candidate conversations for the 2026 general election. By my best accounting, it looks like we have 18 contested races with 46 candidates in Southern Wake, specifically in Holly Springs and Viewquave Arena. There are a few other races that have only one candidate running. We will not be covering those in this segment. Of course, the races on your particular ballot will vary based on your address and the specific districts your residence falls within. You can always find your jurisdictions and eventually your sample ballot by searching NC Voter Search made available by the NC State Board of Elections. Once you get to the page, you'll fill out your information. It will populate with all of those who share your name or information that you provided. You'll scroll until you find you, click on it, verify that it is indeed your name and address, and then scroll down to see the appropriate sections you're looking for, like the jurisdiction or the sample ballot. Since there are so many races, your ballot will likely have both a front and a back, so make sure you flip it over so that you can vote for all of the races you're eligible to vote for. Keep in mind if your time is short, you can search each episode's transcripts at www.ncdeepdive.com, or you can look at the various chapter titles for each of the topics to find the ones that most interest you. For this episode, we are delving into the Wake County Board of Commissioners for the at-large race. There are four candidates running in this particular race. You will have the opportunity to vote for two of them. The candidates running in this race are Gary Dale Hartong, affiliated with the Republican Party, Mona Singh, affiliated with the Democratic Party, Christine Kushner, affiliated with the Democratic Party, and Kyle Stogoski, affiliated with the Republican Party. Without further ado, my friends, let's dive in. On

Mona Singh: Intro, Why, & Experience

Amanda Benbow Lunn 2:13

this episode, I am pleased to be speaking with Mona Singh, who is running for the Wake County Board of Commissioners for the at-large seat. Welcome, Mona. Thank you for joining us today. If you want to take a few moments to introduce yourself and then answer why you're running for this office and what experiences have prepared you to serve in this role.

Mona Singh 2:34

Yeah, hi. Thank you for having me here. It's a great pleasure to talk to you again. We talked before the primary, and here we are again having a little chat. I am Mona Sang, running for one of the two new At Large seats on the County Commission. And uh I have a very uh different background from people who are currently on the county commission. I actually come from a technology background. I've been working for 30 years, building products and services for people, all kinds of things. I've built smartphones, worked on augmented reality, e-commerce, everything in between. So I worked at big corporations and I've focused on solving people's problems, figuring out what the real problems are and figuring out how to solve them. Sometimes with technology, sometimes just by process improvements, sometimes it's just understanding the problem and things just kind of become so apparent, right? But sometimes someone has to spend the time to identify the problem because oftentimes I feel that we are not chasing the correct problems or the actual root problems. So sometimes we're just chasing the symptoms. So that's the expertise I bring. I've been a volunteer for a very long time with the Democratic Party. I have been, you know, canvassing for many, many years. I've been a mentor. I actually was also involved in bringing a lot of Asians out to vote, especially in the last presidential election. I was on the cover of San Francisco Chronicle because in North Carolina we we created this whole movement to get Asians more involved. They usually do not get involved in politics. So I've done some of that and I still do teach refugees English as a volunteer, work with the homeless. So I bring that part of my volunteering experience along with my problem solving using technology experience. And I think in today's day and age, especially with AI and the sort of aftermath that's that's following, we need people who really understand the risks of AI, really understand what kind of policies, what kind of governance we really need to have. And I think, you know, I'll be able to fill that gap of knowing really how things work under the hood and what the risks really are and what the solutions could potentially be. Like eventually, will we ever be able to get data centers? Like, what do we, what point do we need to reach to have AI? And what kind of AI do we want to have? How do we want to educate our children? All of that is kind of very close to my heart, and I want to be able to be a part of that decision-making process.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 5:21

What

Biggest Issue in Wake County

Amanda Benbow Lunn 5:22

do you believe is the most important issue or challenge facing the people you would represent?

Mona Singh 5:27

Yes. So at this point in time in Wake County, I think the change in the landscape because of technology is one big issue. People are losing jobs, it's a big worry as to training. What kind of training do we need? Uh, how do we retrain people? What do we retrain them for, right? What are the jobs of tomorrow going to have? And the other big issue that I think we have across the country is affordability and in particular healthcare affordability. Homes are expensive, rents are expensive, I get that. But in a worst comes to worst, you move to our parents' basement or whatever. But healthcare is a lot more critical. I think that people are spending so much of their resources, of their money on healthcare, and they're still not getting good healthcare. So I hear that all the time from people. Those are, I think, the two big issues in Wake County.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 6:21

Perfect.

Priorities & Hopes for Accomplishment

Amanda Benbow Lunn 6:22

If elected, what would you prioritize and what specifically would you hope to accomplish during your term?

Mona Singh 6:28

So, one of the things, you know, like I said, because I come from a technology background, I spend a lot of time thinking about things that go across silos. So, you know, people think about public education and then housing is another sort of vertical, right? There's healthcare, all of them are sort of disparate areas. What my gut and my training teaches me is to sort of think across them because all of these things are related, right? We talk about education a lot in funding education, but if a child doesn't have a place to stay, right? A child is scout surfing or, you know, with a grandmother or son and then moves to an uncle's house, doesn't have stable housing, that kid's not going to get an education. There's mold in schools, there's HVAC issues. Just the mold is causing so many health problems in children. You know, it causes ADHD, mold does. It's also a hormone disruptor. So kids' health is being impacted by that. So I just want to think more about problems in a different way, which is more focused on people. So, what do our children really need? Do they have all of what they need? Do our elderly have all of you know what they need, including mental health, a social environment where they can interact with people, and so on. So I want to spend my time, you know, thinking across silos, and that takes us to sort of a deeper thing. So the problems often lie in the fact that, you know, our data is disconnected. So someone is homeless, but that data doesn't talk to the healthcare data. So we don't know what the impact is. We're not able to build relationships between those, and that makes it harder for us to serve people in its entirety. So that's kind of what I want to focus on is focus on how do we make the lives of people better in their totality. So it includes education, it includes healthcare, but looking at it from a different perspective.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 8:24

Okay. What

What Should Be Preserved

Amanda Benbow Lunn 8:25

do you believe Wake County is doing well that should be preserved?

Mona Singh 8:28

I think Wake County is doing a very good job with uh bringing businesses here, attracting businesses and good jobs. You know, we're definitely doing that well. Things we need to do better, of course, is with education. We need to make sure we're funding public education for everyone, including special education. And anything that a child needs is well funded so they can learn to the best of their capabilities. So that I think we need to focus on a whole lot more.

What Would You Change

Amanda Benbow Lunn 8:56

Okay. You may have just answered that, but what county policy or practice would you change if elected?

Mona Singh 9:02

So a lot of things you know depend on what the legislature does. So if the legislature actually funds stops giving private school vouchers, we can take that money and then things do things differently. But I think the few things that I would change is grow our healthcare, expand that so more people get the benefits of healthcare. A lot of people are losing health benefits. A lot of people, I mean, even with uh vaccinations and maternal health, all of those things from the federal level are sort of deteriorating. So I want to make sure we up that. I would change that because healthcare is kind of at the crux of everything, you know, like they say if you don't have health, you really have nothing, right? Health is well, you can't learn well, you can't, you know, hold a job. So I would put a lot of focus on health, on mental health, and doing that by building communities. I think that's one place where I think we are not doing a very good job because we first of all we think about things kind of in in silos, and then we think about things, problems and solutions in a very sort of direct way. So for mental health, we think we need mental health care, like it has to come through physicians for other kinds of violence. We think it has to be more policemen, even education, you know, we think of teachers, but I think building communities is extremely important in really having a place, having a community that succeeds. So we really need to focus on, you know, what we can do to build those social relationships, make it kind of natural that there are these community-building efforts that help the youth and the elderly, and it reduces so something goes wrong. There is someone in the community, there's social workers, for example, that can help people before things escalate and things be, you know, there's a 911 call or so. Uh even with education, we can help each other learn. There's people who want to be able to provide a help to others, and there's people who need help. And I think creating that kind of an infrastructure will be extremely beneficial. So I would really want to focus on things that the county can do that really helps build communities. I don't want curfews, I want to provide things for kids to do so that they're not motivated to sort of go create trouble, provide daycare so that parents are not just leaving their kids alone, also to make sure that at least the county employees and our as much as we can make sure we pay people a living wage so people don't have to work two or three jobs and can spend more time with their children. So I will start with you know things that really help build stronger communities.

Infrastructure & Keeping Up with Growth

Amanda Benbow Lunn 11:42

Wake County's continued growth is putting pressure on roads, schools, public safety, housing, utilities, and other county services. How should the county ensure that infrastructure and services keep pace with that growth?

Mona Singh 11:56

Yes, I think that is a very important thing that we need to do. And as we just said, what's good about Wake County is that we have a great environment, we've have good sort of setup for attracting businesses. So a lot of businesses, a lot of people are coming. But what we also need to do is make sure that the infrastructure is growing with that. And for that, I think we really need to plan more at the county level. So, what I would like to see is more interaction between the county and the municipalities so that we have a very well integrated plan for growth within the county. So it's not like Wake County does its own thing, Raleigh's doing its own thing, Cary's doing his own thing, and the growth's happening in Wendale and Rollsville. And I think there's a lot to be gained by sort of putting our minds together and coming up with a plan, and then, of course, executing at the individual municipality level, but also then thinking about how the lives of the people play out, right? So transportation is an important thing. Right now, what I notice is people are building homes, the affordable homes people can afford, are you know $300,000 homes, but they're out far away from where the jobs are often, or what at least one job is hard to get to. So we really need to think about public transportation because at this point in time we're at that level where a very robust public transportation system is going to be necessary for people to be able to lead fulfilling lives. And I think even if when we think of that, we have to think about how we interact with other municipalities because we can have go-Cary buses going around Cary when nobody rides them, because people who really want to come to Cary live in Zebulon or Rolesville, right? Same thing for Raleigh. So making sure that we're thinking about and planning our infrastructure needs and planning them and then executing on them, not letting builders, for example, just get permits and never build. This happens a lot. So planning and then making sure that the execution is actually keeping up with the plan is, I think, an important thing to do.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 14:02

Okay.

Public Education: Balancing Needs, Funding, & School Options

Amanda Benbow Lunn 14:03

Wake County provides significant local funding for public education, while the elected school board is responsible for operating the school system. What do you believe the county's financial responsibility to Wake County public schools should be, particularly as the county continues to grow?

Mona Singh 14:20

So, yeah, I really hope that we can get our state legislature to fulfill its duties with public education, stop giving out private school vouchers. Of course, we need to make sure they don't have a supermajority. We need to elect a number of Democrats. And once we have that, the burden on the county will be less for public education. If that doesn't happen, you know, I think we need to continue. We cannot let public education just fall flat on its face because that's what really is the most important thing for any county. It's not the weather. I mean, people are not moving here just because the weather they can get a job. It's also because they know their kids can get quality education. So we need to keep doing what we can as a county till such times that we can take some of the money that we're putting into public education and support other things that we also very desperately need, like mental health, healthcare, EMS, and Sheriff's Department, DA's office. We are really behind on a lot of other things because we are spending so much of the county's money on education. So I hope we can get to a point where we can start in good conscience spending money on other important things.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 15:33

What

Housing Affordability & Homelessness

Amanda Benbow Lunn 15:34

should Wake County's role be in addressing housing affordability and homelessness?

Mona Singh 15:39

Yeah, I think the county has actually done a lot with homelessness, housing affordability. I think we need to make sure that we don't have rules and regulations that make building homes and building affordable homes more difficult. You know, so one of the things that often came up in talking to developers was the parking minimums and all of those would, you know, increase the cost of housing. There's still several such rules that you have to follow, like how many electric charging stations you have. So some of them are sort of not very practical. And I think over time, especially when we want to start planning and thinking about public transportation well integrated into our housing, then we need to think about, rethink a lot of these policies that we've put in place. But that's going to be the important thing, you know, that we plan affordable housing. The county has actually already spent, put a lot of focus on housing people, affordable housing, making you know shelters for the homeless. And I'm totally committed to keep doing that. And also not destroying the naturally occurring affordable housing, right? There because we already have that. And because when we do that, we if we destroy that, then we have more of a deficit. So I think just continue doing more of what the county's been doing is important.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 16:59

All right.

Approach to the Responsibilities and Decision-Making Authority of this Office

Amanda Benbow Lunn 17:00

How would you approach the responsibilities and decision-making authority of this particular office?

Mona Singh 17:06

So I generally approach things from two different perspectives. One of it is the sort of the data perspective, which is really understanding the numbers. The numbers usually tell a great story. So, you know, for example, if you're thinking about let's say taxes, right? So we take taxes and look at taxes, we can state taxes, corporate taxes. It shows what the values of the state are. They paint a very good picture, you know, if corporate taxes are going down and the personal income taxes are going down and property taxes are going down, then you can tell, okay, this is, you know, these are the values of the people who control these taxes, and these are the values of the people who control the other set of taxes, right? So they paint a picture. And then the second part of it is, you know, that I do alongside is I'm kind of the human-centric product development person. I've been the voice of the customer my whole life. And my gut reaction and my approach always includes talking to people, like really being on the ground floor with everyone. And that's that's where I spend most of my time is, you know, just trying to understand what the real problems of people are, right? Who's getting impacted and what are the impacts. And so then when you put the two together, when you put the data and the people and the people's stories together, then you really understand what the issues are in its entirety, and then you can make decisions.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 18:33

Wake

Balancing Taxes, Obligations, Investments, & Fiscal Responsibility

Amanda Benbow Lunn 18:34

County faces pressure to fund growing demands for services and infrastructure while also keeping the property tax burden reasonable for residents. What is your philosophy on taxation at the county level? And how would you determine whether Wake County's property tax rate is appropriate and whether we can afford the reduction or expense?

Mona Singh 18:54

Yeah, so taxes are, you know, like I said, they paint a picture, they tell us about our values. So I very strongly believe that we need taxes to pay for services, right? I truly believe that the best way to tax people is through corporate taxes and personal income taxes and ideally progressive personal income taxes. But till we have a legislature that's willing to do that and not take our corporate taxes down to zero, we have no choice but to increase property taxes. The problem with property taxes is that they essentially shift the burden from the rich to the poor. They affect everybody equally, but the burden is actually more on the people who can least afford it. It's people with fixed incomes, it's the teachers, the firefighters, anybody on a salary is impacted by that. But then the elderly are already, you know, and people who've been living in their homes for a very long time, have gazillion memories, 50 years, you know, of living in a house, and that is their life, and then the property value goes up and the taxes go up, they really suffer a lot. And I think that's a crux, the crux of a lot of homelessness as well, is people just not being able to afford property taxes, they sell their homes, they think the money will be enough for them to sort of survive for the remainder of their lives, but it doesn't work that way because money kind of just vanishes, and especially if you're not used to dealing with money, it's gone before you know it, and then they are in a pretty bad uh situation. What I really think with taxes is that you know we just keep fighting and advocating for corporate taxes not to be taken down to zero and the personal income taxes not to be taken down to 2.95% as is planned, and so we don't have to increase our property taxes. However, till that happens, we have to keep the county going, we have to provide services, and the way to do it is property taxes. So that's just going to be not the best solution, but that's what we have to do.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 21:00

Okay.

Deciding What Takes Precedence

Amanda Benbow Lunn 21:01

When priorities compete or resources are limited, how would you decide what takes precedence?

Mona Singh 21:07

This is an interesting question because in my job as a product manager, director of product, the biggest challenge is to prioritize what gets done, right? Which feature are we going to build? What are we going to do this year, next year, and why? And the way I have always approached these is again, you know, thinking about the people, the users, right? In this case, the residents of Wake County. What is the going to be the most value? So you build the business value for whatever you're trying to do. So let's say we want to build a hospital and we want to build five roads. So you really have to think about what the benefit to the people is going to be. Essentially, build the business case for each of them and then decide which one takes precedence. And one thing I've learned over the years is that very often we think about A or B, but we can also change our thinking so that we're saying, okay, we're going to do a little bit of A, like one eighth of A this year, and one fifth of B this year, and then slowly keep moving everything along because the decisions don't always have to be this or that, right? So one of the things I think the skill that I bring is to be able to break things down into sort of meaningful chunks and then make sure that you can move things along little by little. Because what happens is if you keep doing one thing, you know, and never touch the other thing, then five years down you'll have a bigger problem than you have today, right? So the talent that's needed to really figure out how to move multiple things around, multiple things forward slowly, and picking the parts of them that are the most valuable that you can build on is kind of the sort of my professional expertise for many years. So and I think I will lean very much on that in a building business cases, but not making it an or, but you know, it's an and. Let's do this and that, but just figure out how we're going to break it down piece by piece.

AI Risks, Data Centers, And Privacy

Amanda Benbow Lunn 23:11

All right. And you mentioned your expertise. So maybe we can go into kind of your thoughts on data centers and the AI and safeguards and what your professional expertise is in that realm.

Mona Singh 23:23

Yeah, I didn't mention it earlier, but you know, I've worked on AI since I was a graduate student. In fact, I worked on natural language understanding back in the day when it was very young. So I understand sort of from that perspective. And I also over the years have worked on various other types of AI, including the AI that's in our smartphones. And I worked on those, you know, a lot of my patents are on the AI that's in here. So AI has been around. I mean, people just think that it was born in 2025, which it wasn't, right? I worked on it in in the late 80s, and it was around for a very long time before that. So I think what we need to do, the way we need to approach it is, you know, what are the different types of AI? So a lot of the cancer research, for example, that happens now is because of AI. You can learn, right? You can learn about, you could go into data, you can see patterns, you can do all of that. Do I ever want that to stop? No, never, right? So that's one thing. There's several things like when you ask for directions, there's some level of AI that happens here. Your facial recognition, if you have a Tesla and it's self-driving, that's AI. So all of that is AI, and you know, we've come to accept a lot of that. It's become a part of our life. Speech recognition is AI, right? What's new and more scary is the sort of the generative AI where you can create videos, you can make things so real, you can create poems, you can learn from someone's poetry, and you can create a poem which seems like they wrote it, right? Or have a video and you can create that. So there's also things like taking data that's in flock cameras and tracking people and building their you know profiles, doing all kinds of things. So we really need to think about AI as what exactly are we talking about, right? Which type is it? Automation: There's a lot of automation that's gonna happen is starting to happen now where you can say, okay, I do these five things every day, they're the most boring things. You know, I want to automate it, so it'll it'll happen. Some of that happens, you know, if when you go to the Hunt library, there's a little robot that'll go get the book, right? It's been there for many years, but there's other sort of things that can be automated. Now, the risks with all of that is that AI, you know, we whatever we may think of, computers will never be as smart as humans because right, if this is real intelligence and that's artificial, or we're trying to create intelligence out of code and it's going to make mistakes, it and it does make mistakes, and the mistakes can be really bad. So we want to make sure that doesn't happen, that it doesn't make bad mistakes. But it's also important that we know what kind of mistakes it can make, we know what kind of how we are going to evaluate any system, right? So we have, let's say we have flock cameras, we put the flock cameras there, you say, okay, it's just data, you know, it's just taking pictures, recording everything. But when you have data, policies that we need are, you know, who who has access to that, what algorithm, what kind of models are being built out of that, right? What is it being used for? Um, but the most important is it's access as well, right? Who can access this for what purpose? So we need to start thinking about a lot of the sort of this digital world, like we did when you know. So if you think about someone wanting to access, come into your house, they need to go to a judge and they get need to get an order before they can enter, right? Same thing for data that's recorded by a flock camera or recorded by other sensors as you walk around. You go for a run, that's being recorded, you're on that camera, right? So we really need to treat that world just as a real world, right? You need explicit permission to access something, and then you also need to make sure that there's no learning going on under the covers, right? Because the data sitting there can build all kinds of models. Uh, where does it go? How does it store it? What particular things get stored, what relationships get built from the data that's being stored. So all of that becomes really important, and I think we need to sort of have good governance on that. We need to have good governance on what, say, the county employees use these things for because things can be wrong. So there's good users and there's bad users. There's also the problem that you may not know that something is bad. So, what we need to put in place is also uh how we test, how do we evaluate system evaluations are going to be extremely important and they're not very easy to do because it's not like an algorithm that you can, you know, just look at and say, "Oh, I don't want this line." because it's just building a model. So, uh, how you're gonna evaluate that and make sure it's not giving the right answer, it's not leading kids to suicide or you know, doing any of that bad stuff is also very important. So that's the kind of thing that we really need to dive into and build guidelines and policies for.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 28:28

Okay. How

Working with Municipalities

Amanda Benbow Lunn 28:29

should the county work with municipalities as they make decisions affecting countywide growth and infrastructure?

Mona Singh 28:35

Yeah, I touched on that a little bit earlier. And to me, I really think that we need to think and plan countywide and then bring everybody together, sort of have a plan that works for everyone because it's like a puzzle, right? It's really, well, you know, I live in Cary, but I probably go. I mean, these days it's different, but you you know, you're working in one place, you're doing your grocery shopping in Morrisville, and you're so it's it's all connected, and oftentimes you don't even know where exactly you are, right? Especially if you're in the Cary Morrisville area, even with Raleigh. We're all connected, and our success really depends on how well we can plan for the people across our municipalities. So I would really want to put a lot of emphasis on planning, not just planning our infrastructure, planning our schools, planning our transportation together, but also planning things like what we're doing for technology. I know Cary, I'm on their information services advisory board for Cary, and I know we're talking about some things that we can do with technology, some policies, and Raleigh's thinking about the same things, right? And I'm sure other municipalities are, but if we were to put our minds together, it would be first of all, you know, save us costs because not everyone's doing the same deep dive, spending all the money, trying out things, doing pilots, whatever in one, and then other people are doing it. So there's something to be said for efficiencies that we could gain everywhere if we have good dialogue even at that level. So you know, technology is one example, but uh probably everything, right? I mean, you know, whether it's affordable housing, you know, how it all comes into play, how we can leverage each other's talents. Uh, you know, if you think about arts and general recreation kind of stuff, what I've noticed is that you know, Raleigh, of course, has a lot of funding for that, and Nightdale may have nothing, right? They don't have anything in the budget. So I think that's another area where and they may not have people. So I've looked at some municipalities, and I'll, you know, you look at them and say, okay, you know, these guys really cannot afford to do that. But if we were to come together and say, okay, you know, we could do this arts festival maybe in this location, so we can bring the arts to those residents that would not otherwise be able to access it. It would help everyone. I mean, we have to really think as one

Thoughts on Property Tax Amendment

Mona Singh 30:57

unit.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 30:57

What are your thoughts on the property tax amendment that is going to be on everyone's ballot?

Mona Singh 31:03

Everybody should vote no for all of the amendments. They are tricks essentially, they can only hurt us. There's nothing good that can come out of them. So I'm against the property tax amendment and the other amendments.

Accountability: What & How

Amanda Benbow Lunn 31:16

Okay. What should voters hold you accountable for if you are elected and how?

Mona Singh 31:20

I think voters should hold me accountable for making sure that when I am on the board of commissioners and making a decision that I'm representing the voice of the residents. To me, that's the most important thing. You know, of course, accountability also comes in transparency, which I really want to bring. Yeah, so in the corporate world, there's the transparency is is tremendous. Every little thing is transparent, everybody knows exactly, but there's also accountability as to progress, which I think we can improve at the county level. So, for example, you know, we have a non-discrimination ordinance in the county. At any given moment, anybody should be able to tell how many cases have come to the county, what the root causes were, what the resolutions were, and were any steps taken to make sure that it doesn't happen again. Similarly, with things like the county wants to be energy independent, by I think it's 2050, but I could be wrong, I haven't looked at the date in a while. But so at any given time, you know, it should be apparent to everyone where the progress is. So when we set our vision, when we set our goals, when we make our plans, having accountability as to where we are, what we've done, where every penny is going is something that I believe extremely strongly because ultimately it's every citizen's money, it's every citizen's trust that's going into the board of commissioners. So the accountability is 100% to the residents of Wake County.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 32:55

Okay. As

Last Thoughts

Amanda Benbow Lunn 32:56

we wrap up, is there anything we haven't discussed that you would like voters to know or anything from our conversation that you'd like to expand upon or clarify? Or any last thoughts that you have?

Mona Singh 33:06

The only thing I'd like to say is that when people make decisions about elected office, I would encourage people to think about, you know, what makes a well-rounded body, right? If it's whether it's city council or county commission. So you look at what talents and experiences, expertise exist and figure out what's missing and use that as a decision-making process for everything, not just here, but for everything. Because I think what happens is that when you have different expertise, different experiences, that's when you get good results. You get better results because people bring different viewpoints. And that's what I bring. I bring, you know, of course, a technology experience, but I also bring experience of having been born in a different country, which nobody else on the county. Board of Commissioners has that. They're all born here. I also have the experience of having moved from another place. Like 55% of residents in Wake County have come where else. A lot of technology people move from other places. I've, you know, bring the expertise of having seen many, many, many 50 or so different countries and how things are done in different countries. So the breadth of expertise, uh, experiences, I think, is unique in my case. So just wanted to highlight that.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 34:24

Sure. And for

Where to Learn More

Amanda Benbow Lunn 34:25

voters who want to learn more about you, your platform, your campaign, endorsements, and priorities, where can they go to find that information?

Mona Singh 34:32

Yeah, so my website is Mona M-O-N-A F-O-R-W A K E Monafor Wake.com. And it should have plenty of information. I'm also on Instagram, Mona for Wake, and threads. So there's a lot of social media presence as well as the website.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 34:53

Perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Mona. I really appreciate you taking the time and choosing to speak to voters directly. I wish you the best of luck with your campaign. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Closing Reflections & Voting Info

Amanda Benbow Lunn 35:06

Democracy is built on participation. Politics can sometimes feel distant or abstract, but the decisions made by our elected officials at the county, state, and federal levels have a profound effect on the communities we call home and the way we live our lives. From the roads we drive on and the schools our children attend to public safety, parks and recreation, housing, health care, taxes, the economy, and the many other services and amenities that make up our communities, government plays a role in shaping both our everyday experience and our future. That makes taking the time to understand the choices on your ballot and the people asking for your vote an important part of being an engaged member of your community. Early voting for the 2026 midterm election begins October 15th and runs through October 31st. In Southern Wake County, there will be early voting locations at the Hunt Center in Holly Springs, the Hilltop Needmore Town Park Clubhouse in Fuquay Varina, Beech Bluff County Park, and Southern Wake Tech Campus close by. Election Day is November 3rd. A general reminder that you will need a valid photo ID to vote. The regular voter registration deadline is October 9th, although you may still register when you vote during the early voting period. Please note that you cannot register to vote on Election Day itself, and that that day you will absolutely have to vote at your designated precinct location to have access to your full ballot. And because there are so many races and ballot measures this year, your ballot will likely be double-sided. It can be helpful to start on the back so that you don't accidentally overlook anything. You'll vote for the races that apply to your jurisdiction along with statewide amendments and for Southern Wake County voters, local Wake County bond referenda. Voting is one of the ways we take part in the communities we share. You don't have to agree with your neighbors or even with the candidates you've heard here to recognize that our communities are shaped by the people who show up, ask questions, learn about the choices before them, and cast their ballots. So please take the time to get informed, make your voice heard, and encourage the people around you to do the same. Your vote matters. Your voice matters. And you absolutely matter, my friend. And with that, this episode of the NC Deep Dive has come to an end. Please feel free to check out this episode's show notes at ncdeepdive.com for further information and relevant links for this candidate along with general election information. As always, if you have any topics or thoughts you'd like to share, you can find us on social media or email us at ncdeepdive at gmail.com. If you found value in this episode, I'd love for you to subscribe, rate, and share it so that others may more easily be informed. Please make sure to stay tuned for all the relevant candidate, amendment, and referenda episodes for the 2026 midterm election by visiting ncdeepdive.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you currently listen to your podcasts. Until next time, my friends, Namaste: The Love and Light in me sees and honors the love and light in you.