America’s least fun job? Election official

It was November 2022 and Beth Gilbert was running the midterm elections in Luzerne County in Pennsylvania when the voting machines ran out of paper. Although she was only 28 years old, she had a masters degree in political management and had already served on the city council. Initially Gilbert had been hired as deputy director of the Bureau of Elections. But when she was only three months into the job, the director quit and she found herself in charge of managing the voting process.

When the paper shortage was discovered, Gilbert dispatched teams to polling sites with fresh supplies; a local judge allowed polling stations to stay open by two extra hours to accommodate the delays. But as the news of the debacle spread, Gilbert and her colleagues received a slew of vitriolic texts, phone calls and social-media comments:

Pictures of Gilbert’s two-year-old son, screenshotted from her Facebook profile, circulated on social media. She had to notify his kindergarten about the threats. “It was the most difficult period of my life,” she told me, her voice faltering at the memory. “It was national news.”

At first the county election board refused to certify the results. There were meetings, legal wrangling, public uproar, protests. One right-wing activist hissed “dead man walking” at Gilbert as she and other bureau staff wheeled out the locked cages of ballots for adjudication. She installed security cameras at her house, and alarms on the windows and doors that would alert a security company in case of a break-in. Despite the harassment, she applied to become director of the bureau on a permanent basis. “I loved the job itself. I thought, if I can handle this, I can handle anything.” She was turned down. And the abuse took a bigger toll than she anticipated. In June 2023 “finally it became too much” and she quit.

Wilkes-Barre, (pronounced Wilkes-Berry, or Wilkes-Bear), is an unassuming small city in eastern Pennsylvania. Nineteenth-century coal mining made it prosperous, but it’s now a little down at heel. Grand Victorian houses line the Susquehanna river, but its main avenues are full of empty shop fronts. It has a modern university campus, handsome churches of almost every denomination, a boarded-up mosque, a Masonic temple, two local newspapers and two breweries.

The town is the county seat of Luzerne, a swing county in the most important state of this year’s presidential election. Trump-Vance lawn signs are interspersed with those for Harris-Walz. Several people told me that plenty of folk were wary of putting up any signs at all, because of the hostility partisans feel to voters of a different stripe. Luzerne was once a union stronghold that voted Democrat. Over the past decade or so, it has been shading Republican: Donald Trump won here handily in 2016 and by a narrower margin in 2020. When Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, was elected governor of Pennsylvania in 2022, he squeaked to victory in Luzerne by a margin of 1%.

A series of electoral controversies have put Luzerne in the national spotlight. In 2020 President Trump made a hue and cry over nine ballots for him that were found in the rubbish – it later transpired that an election worker had thrown them out by mistake. The paper shortage of 2022 prompted a congressional hearing that was billed by the Republican majority as a look into “government voter suppression” in Luzerne (an inquiry determined that the lack of paper had limited impact on the election). Most recently, in the Wilkes-Barre city-council election last year, some voters received postal ballots for the wrong district.

America has no federal election system: each state has its own election laws and each county – over 3,000 nationwide and 67 in Pennsylvania alone – administers elections, which are subject to local officials and regulations. Against the backdrop of former President Trump’s continuing insistence that the 2020 contest was “stolen”, the election process, which should be purely technical, has become contentious and politicised.

The dysfunction in Luzerne can be blamed in part on the county’s charter, which has engendered a power struggle between different bodies. An elected 11-member county council appoints a county manager to run the county administration. But responsibility for elections is shared between the Bureau of Elections, which is responsible for operations, and a Board of Elections, which contains two Democrats and two Republicans appointed by the council who then choose their own chair. The board oversees the work of the bureau. The complexity has not encouraged confidence in the system.

Frustrated by her experiences at the Bureau of Elections, Gilbert became an activist. Now she is the voting and elections manager at In This Together, an organisation in north-eastern Pennsylvania that campaigns for left-wing causes. I met Gilbert, with In This Together’s director and founder, Alisha Hoffman-Mirilovich, in their office in the centre of Wilkes-Barre. It was cosy if messy – full of pamphlets and posters and boxes of envelopes. Hoffman-Mirilovich started her activism in response to Trump’s election in 2016. “All these small groups popped up; often they were women-led.” Her six-year-old son, Xander, was dubbed “activist baby” because she would often take him to demonstrations.

Gilbert is now subjecting officials in Luzerne to the same kind of scrutiny that she faced. When we met, In This Together had recently filed a lawsuit against Romilda Crocamo, the county manager, protesting against her decision not to deploy drop boxes – which people who can’t or don’t want to queue on election day use to cast their votes in the weeks before – and were waiting for their lawyer to call with a court date.

Drop boxes were first used in Pennsylvania in 2020, as the pandemic placed enormous strain on the US Postal Service. In Luzerne four drop boxes have been put in place since 2022. Richard Morelli, a hale software salesman and one of the Republicans on the Board of Elections, told me he thought they caused more problems than they were worth: they had to be monitored by CCTV cameras and needed to be picked up by a sheriff’s deputy to secure the chain of custody. (In some counties drop boxes are manned constantly, but Luzerne doesn’t have the resources.)

There was also the risk of “ballot harvesting”, whereby someone could gather ballots in, say, an old people’s home and deposit them in one go. (This practice is illegal, though there is no evidence of harvesting ever having happened in Luzerne.) Eugene Ziemba, chair of the Luzerne Republican Party, said that drop boxes had been put in place as a response to covid “and I think everyone now realises covid is phoney and we already have a wonderful system of drop boxes called the US Mail.” In a county the size of Luzerne – nearly 2,500 square kilometres, or 970 square miles – four drop boxes were “like spitting in the wind”.

In the midst of an election season jammed with litigation over electoral procedures – in recent months the Republican Party has brought over 90 lawsuits, most of them in swing states – drop boxes are a partisan issue. Trump has consistently denigrated mail-in ballots as unreliable, even as he has encouraged Republicans to use them. In Pennsylvania they have tended to skew Democrat. For Gilbert and Hoffman-Mirilovich, getting rid of drop boxes was an attempt to suppress voters.

I met Crocamo, Luzerne’s county manager, on October 3rd at the county administration office in Wilkes-Barre. Crocamo has held numerous positions in the county administration and is no stranger to political outcries. She is a registered Democrat but her appointment is dependent on the Republican majority on the county council. She has a no-nonsense manner and throws her hands up at the brouhaha. She said her reason for removing the drop boxes related to their security, but she couldn’t comment further as the lawsuit was ongoing.

On the same visit I met the director of the Bureau of Elections, Emily Cook. Cook is young and self-effacing with big glasses. She comes from a “tradition of serving fellow citizens” – her great-grandmother was a poll worker. Cook was Gilbert’s deputy during the paper-shortage controversy of 2022. Tacked up on her office wall are the social-media threats she received at the time. “That’s the worst I’ve ever seen from the people of Luzerne County, that level of hostility and hatred. I keep them up as a reminder to myself, to do better, to make sure there’s no ‘if’, ‘and’ or ‘but’ and we ensure safe and secure elections...Some people are still calling for me to be fired.” Cook told me that the abuse she had to endure was “very reflective” of the increased partisanship in American politics. “It’s no longer: I disagree with your political beliefs, but let’s get a beer afterwards. It’s: if you don’t agree with me, you’re the enemy.”

Cook is the fourth director of the Luzerne Bureau of Elections in as many years. There are a number of reasons for the high turnover of officials. The county is labouring under a huge debt; the hangover of corruption scandals during the 1980s is still felt; county salaries are low and budgets are stretched. But harassment, endless calls for audits and recounts, and an influx of records requests have played a huge part in pushing county officials to step down – in Luzerne and elsewhere.

This means that some of the officials who will oversee the 2024 elections in counties across America are green; others are avowed election deniers. Since 2020, county-level election officials in five swing states – Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada as well as Pennsylvania – have tried to block the certification of vote tallies in various contests.

Election officials I spoke to in Pennsylvania, both Democratic and Republican, maintain that the adjudications over whether a ballot is valid are, in general, conducted amicably across party lines. Morelli, a Republican representative on the Board of Elections, took up his unpaid volunteer position on the board less than a year ago. He described the process of election oversight as “tedious”: more than a week of standing around a table, sorting ballots into around 15 different categories of problem. These range from undated mail-in ballot envelopes, to forms filled in using non-regulation coloured ink, to marks outside or in between voting boxes. “You don’t want to take someone’s vote away”, he said, “just because they are not 100% inside the lines. But there are rules and the public has the responsibility to follow the rules.”

The In This Together office is just a couple of blocks from the county administration building where Crocamo has her office, which itself is one floor above the Bureau of Elections office. Political divisions cut across families. Hoffman-Mirilovich’s parents are Republicans; she is no longer on speaking terms with some members of her husband’s family.

The threat of violence never seems far away. According to Hoffman-Mirilovich, “a lot of people” from the area were at the riot at the Capitol on January 6th. The Rod of Iron Ministries, a Moonie sect whose members take guns to church, has protested outside election offices. In 2020 there were threats to bomb In This Together’s headquarters. At the time this was Hoffman-Mirilovich’s home.

The other problem faced by election officials is the very real effect of disinformation. In Luzerne there is a hum of background noise about supposed illegal voting by non-citizens. Ziemba, the Republican county chair, told me that he had recently heard “from someone who is very smart” that in 2022 the machines that ran out of paper were “only in precincts where there were predominantly Republican voters”. The manager of a shop in Wilkes-Barre was told that dead people’s votes had been cast last time in Luzerne. There is no evidence that either of these stories is true.

Crocamo and Cook have tried to make the process more transparent. They are even livestreaming the storage rooms where ballots are being kept. “Everything associated with a ballot will be filmed,” said Crocamo. And they hold weekly public meetings in Wilkes-Barre with the election board, open to the public . But rumours are sticky. One pro-Trump activist claimed that there were 15,000 unprocessed voter-registration forms sitting in the Bureau of Elections. Crocamo reassured Ziemba, at one of the meetings, that the figure was incorrect and that there was no backlog. Ziemba remained unconvinced. He complained that the bureau, citing privacy issues, had put up curtains around desks to screen officials processing the registrations. “I’m very concerned because of this non-transparency. I just want to make sure they’re not hiding something.” But, he said, “I’m not going to go so far as to say I feel there are shenanigans.”

A few hours after I talked to her, Crocamo received a letter from the attorney-general of Pennsylvania stating that she did not have the authority to remove drop boxes. Over the following weekend, a deal was hashed out with In This Together: the case was shelved and two drop boxes were installed.

Crocamo said she respected the attorney-general’s instruction but was still worried about violence. “I have been told by many sources that there will be unofficial people watching people put their ballots in. I just hope they are civil and there are no physical confrontations.”

Hoffman-Mirilovich and Gilbert of In This Together were pleased with their victory, but concerned that the fights over the drop boxes and voter registrations were a prelude to what would come on election day. Everyone expects a tight vote, and litigation to follow. Armies of lawyers are massing. “We know these groups are trying to pressure county election officials into not certifying the election.” If that happens, no one knows exactly what will come next. By state law, all counties in Pennsylvania must certify their votes by December; the secretary of state, the most senior election official, has the power to go to court and mandate counties to perform certifications. The office is currently filled by Al Schmidt, a moderate Republican, who, as an election commissioner in Philadelphia, resisted efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s win in 2020.

Still, everyone I talked to – officials, activists, lawyers, politicians – expected a limbo period of days or even weeks while litigation ping-pongs between courts and jurisdictions. In February Governor Shapiro formed an election-threats task force in Pennsylvania to co-ordinate security between the Department of Homeland Security, the US attorney’s office and the County Commissioners Association in case of disruptions at the polls or unrest.

It all depends on how close the vote is. The polls in Pennsylvania remain extremely tight. In September, for the first time, registered Republicans outnumbered registered Democrats in the county. “If Mr Trump won when we were 20,000 down,” Ziemba told me, referring to the numbers in the last election, “this year we’re gonna smoke ’em.”

On November 5th the 186 polling stations in Luzerne will open their doors at 7am. Cook and Crocamo are gearing up. The mail-in ballots went out in early October, ahead of schedule. All equipment went through “logic and accuracy testing”: machines were powered up and programmed, and mock ballot papers were run through them. Then they were sealed. Toner levels in printers have been checked, back-up generators secured in case of power cuts, and contingency plans put in place for every kind of weather and incident. The one thing Cook isn’t worried about this time, she joked, is paper – she’s ordered plenty.

Crocamo feels the weight of responsibility. “I’m up in the middle of the night. But I have a job to do. Man the torpedoes, full steam ahead, they’re not going to stop me. But then again, you may want to talk to my partner – she can tell I’m troubled by it all.”

“It’s like the illustration in the book ‘The Cat in the Hat’,” Cook said. “When he’s balancing a ball, plates and cups and a fish. You can’t let anything fall. It has to stay up. It’s a process that is above your politics or my politics. It’s democracy. It’s the republic in action.” ■

Wendell Steavenson won the 2024 Orwell Prize for Journalism for her reporting for 1843 magazine from Ukraine and Israel

images: getty, reuters, EYEVINE