Pennsylvania’s Luzerne county has experienced high-profile mistakes exacerbated by high staff turnover that have been seized on by conspiracy theorists
Emily Cook remembers that she never ate her blueberry muffin.
It was election day in November 2022, and Cook was the deputy director in the election office in Luzerne county, an industrial swath of north-east Pennsylvania. Soon after voting started, Cook started to hear piecemeal reports of a problem at the polls: some locations didn’t have enough paper. When she got to her office, multiple phones were thrust into her hands, each with a crisis. By the time election day was over, she had forgotten about the muffin.
Then came the harassment. In the following weeks, people started showing up at meetings, furious about the incident, believing the mishap had been an intentional effort to suppress the vote (an investigation attributed the problem to human error). Cook and other people in the election office received vile threats.
High turn-over in any place is not good, during an election year it could be fatal having such inexperience constantly plaguing officials. I know how bad high turn-over can bite, my employer chews through people faster than a pack of gum exposed to a class of kids.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In the following weeks, people started showing up at meetings, furious about the incident, believing the mishap had been an intentional effort to suppress the vote (an investigation attributed the problem to human error).
She was waiting for pollbooks to be delivered, and the deadline to send out ballots to overseas and military voters was just two days away, but she still didn’t have a final list of candidates because of pending court challenges.
There was shock when Trump flipped Luzerne county, long a Democratic stronghold in 2016, said John Kennedy, a political science professor at West Chester University in south-eastern Pennsylvania.
While Trump won it again in 2020, Biden was able to claw back some of the voters he lost in 2020, something he’ll try to do more of this year as he seeks to win Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state in the US presidential election.
That’s why she’s pushed to have the ballots posted on the county website early for public review, and to send out regular updates with what election tasks staff are working on.
“I think that there’s a certain portion of the population that wants elections to fail,” Crocamo said during an interview in a conference room in the county building, which she was using to work while a leak was fixed in her office.
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