Drop boxes and delays: under-fire election office ends up pleasing no one

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.

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.

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 .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.