'Holding things together by a thread': PA county election officials quit after 'being abused'

The unusually high turnover rate of election officials in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania has left the county with a drought of institutional experience just a year before what's expected to be a close presidential election.

In an article published Saturday, the Guardian reported that Luzerne County — which former President Donald Trump won by 14 points in 2020 and 19 points in 2016 — had been plagued by an "exodus" of election officials in the wake of scandals caused by human error. Now, the new election administrators are scrambling to restore trust in the office ahead of the 2024 election, where Pennsylvania's 19 electoral college votes will likely play a significant role in deciding the next president of the United States.

"[Luzerne County is] a good example of an office that hasn’t been invested in and it shows,” Jennifer Morrell, the CEO and co-founder of The Elections Group — a consulting firm that worked with Luzerne county to improve processes in 2021 — told the Guardian. "I think there are a lot of other offices like that maybe haven’t had the public problems, but it’s probably because they’re kind of holding things together by a thread. Or more likely by duct tape."

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Some of the more notable errors the Northeastern Pennsylvania county's elections officials saw under its watch included an incident in which nine mail-in ballots — several of which were for Trump — were mistakenly thrown out in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election. Trump's Department of Justice investigated the incident and ultimately attributed it to an "administrative error." The county elections director at the time of the 2020 election.

In a separate incident in 2021, a Dominion Voting Systems representative who set up voting machines accidentally programmed machines to read "Democratic ballot" at the top of forms. This resulted in the office being "swamped" by angry phone calls from voters just 15 minutes after polls opened that morning.

"We should have caught it. But we didn’t. You never proofread your own work and a lot of times when you proofread you’re looking for the highlights," former Luzerne County elections director Robert Morgan, who took over the post in 2021 before resigning by the end of the year, said. "The problem is in a heightened situation where people don’t feel you’re credible and you make a simple error like that and it just lights the fire for everything everyone thought they were getting cheated by last time."

In 2022, when Beth Gilbert McBride was overseeing elections, Luzerne County experienced another snafu when multiple precincts reported not having enough paper to feed voting machines, which resulted in poll workers having to turn voters away. Despite those precincts telling the county ahead of the election that there wasn't enough paper on hand, McBride said the paper order "never materialized." When officials brought over replacement paper from a county warehouse, poll workers found that the paper was too thick to work with Dominion's machines. Republicans alleged "voter suppression," though an investigation found that just 16 of 143 precincts reported paper shortages, and only four election judges reported a pause in voting.

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"The evidence shows that the failure to provide paper to the polling places was not a deliberate act, but rather a catastrophic oversight," the investigation read.

Luzerne County manager Linda Crocamo told the Guardian that the high turnover of election officials was a direct result of them "being abused" by both public officials and "receiving threats" from voters.

“We had individuals who worked in the bureau who were very good, very competent, but who were being abused. They were being verbally abused by board members. Some government representatives. People in the public coming to meetings," Crocamo said. "If there were individuals who worked in the bureau and had institutional memory and they were gone. That was gone as well. All that was gone.”

The exodus of election officials isn't limited to Pennsylvania. In the years since the 2020 election, both Democratic and Republican election workers have reported a deluge of threats that have driven experienced poll workers out of the industry. During a Senate committee hearing, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said 12 of 15 counties in the state have seen their top election administrators quit. And in Buckingham County, Virginia, the county's entire election staff quit in 2023.

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"You’re making $65,000 and you’re going to work and people are publicly abusing you? And you’re receiving threats. That’s not an incentive to get out of bed and get to the office," Crocamo said.