John Jefferson
A battleground Pennsylvania county with a history of election errors is facing heavy criticism from activists on both sides of the political spectrum over the way it is running its presidential vote in 2024.
Conservative activists, who have dominated recent election board meetings, say the county isn’t processing voter registrations fast enough – something county officials say is simply untrue. Voting rights groups, meanwhile, are furious over a recent decision by the county manager in Luzerne county in the north-eastern part of the state to get rid of ballot drop boxes.
A series of high-profile errors in Luzerne county have put its elections under a microscope. In 2020, a temporary employee accidentally threw out overseas mail-in ballots, an episode that Donald Trump used to claim voter fraud. In 2022, the county ran out of paper at some voting locations, an episode that Republicans used to question the results of the election (an investigation attributed the incident to human error). There has also been an extraordinary amount of turnover in the office. The current election director, Emily Cook, is the seventh person to hold the job since the fall of 2019.
County officials have spent the last year working to get the county back on track to run a smooth election and regain the trust of voters. But the memory of the errors lingers and any error or delay can become fodder for those seeking to undermine the credibility of the vote – something that could create a volatile scenario if Trump contests the election results this fall.
Voter registration is nearly evenly split between Republicans and Democrats in Luzerne county. Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, narrowly won the county in 2022. Donald Trump carried the county by more than 14 percentage points in 2020, a drop from his 20-point margin in 2016 .
Scott Presler, a well-known Republican activist who organized events protesting against Trump’s loss in the 2020 election and is now leading an effort to register voters, appeared at a meeting of the county election board on 18 September and accused officials of intentionally delaying the processing of voter registrations. He cited a “reliable source”, but did not provide any more information.
“If people are living in Florida and you are backlogged to the point that October 29 comes and mail-in ballots are sent by November 2, those mail-in ballots may not get here by November 5 at 8pm eastern time zone,” he said. Republicans have generally opposed allowing election offices to accept mail-in ballots that arrive after election day, even if the voter put them in the mail beforehand.
Romilda Crocamo, the county manager, said the accusation that the county was delaying the processing of voter registrations was false.
On Monday, the county said it had 4,101 pending voter registrations. Cook told the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader that the county had made progress on the backlog, but that it shot up before the weekend. The county has brought on 10 additional staff members to help with the backlog, the outlet reported.
“I don’t know where those rumors are coming from. They’re not true. We’re on schedule,” Cook said in an interview. “We are on task. We will have all the registrations completed by the [21 October] deadline. And to me, it’s just another example that there’s a certain element of people that want us to fail and want us to redirect our resources or our attention to something that really isn’t a problem.”
When someone turns in a voter registration application, she said, the county election office reviews the information before it gets verified by different state agencies. That process takes time, Crocamo said.
Presler, who did not respond to interview requests, and other activists have been blanketing the county as part of an effort to get Republican voter registrations to outnumber Democratic ones. They succeeded in that goal earlier this week.
Some of the registrations that activists are turning in are duplicates, Crocamo said. Others are applications for mail-in ballots – all of which take staff time to sort through and verify.
The elections bureau has also been getting hounded with phone calls, inundating the half-dozen or so staff members who answer the phones. Crocamo has approved overtime and sent additional county staff to help.
Cook told the Times-Leader that many of the calls appear to be scripted, asking about the backlog in voter registrations, illegal immigrants, voter purging and whether the county ordered enough paper.
Crocamo is also under fire for a decision last week to eliminate mail-in ballot drop boxes for this fall’s election. The county previously used four drop boxes, but the county doesn’t have the staff to monitor them this fall, she said, and video surveillance “doesn’t prevent something from happening”.
“We can’t afford to do it,” she said. “I cannot secure the drop boxes. And, you know, sometimes I have to make difficult decisions. And I know that there are people who feel that they rely on the drop boxes.”
Rightwing activists quickly seized on the announcement to support the false claim that drop boxes facilitate voter fraud. The claim was quickly boosted by Elon Musk, who has spread several false claims about elections.
Alisha Hoffman-Mirilovich, the executive director of Action Together NEPA, a progressive group, decried the decision to get rid of drop boxes. “We’ve even had members and folks reach out to us to actually say that they feel more, they feel safer going to a drop box than they do their polling location because of threats,” she said.
She added that she didn’t think Crocamo had the authority to unilaterally get rid of drop boxes. Elections in the county are jointly overseen by a board of elections, which sets election policy, and the county manager, who reports to the elected county council. The board has supported drop boxes.
“Your last-minute unilateral move and unsubstantiated public statements that the drop boxes are not secure elevates a false narrative about mail voting and sows distrust in election administration. It serves only to create chaos in the community,” Marian Schneider, a lawyer with the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a letter to Crocamo, urging her to reverse her decision.
On Tuesday evening, In This Together NEPA held a press conference outside the county courthouse urging the restoration of drop boxes. A group of anti-drop box activists stood nearby and shouted over the speakers, making it difficult to hear them at times.
One of the speakers was Carole Shearer, 69, who is retired and lives in Butler Township in Luzerne county. Just before the primary election, her grandson had a health emergency that caused her and her husband to have to leave the county.
“We dropped everything and drove through the night to provide care for his three-year-old brother. If not for drop box voting in advance of election day, our right to vote would have been forfeited if an instance like this fell on election day. That’s unacceptable,” she said.
Hannah Butterwick, another Luzerne county voter, said she relied on drop boxes because she and her one-year-old son were immunocompromised. She was skeptical that safety was a legitimate excuse for getting rid of the drop boxes.
“These vague excuses of safety do not make sense. You’ve secured 130 polling locations, but you can’t manage to find a way to secure four drop boxes?” she said. “If security is truly the concern, then a solution should have been found well before now, instead of the total removal of one of our voting options.”
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