This Swing County Is The Country’s Post-2020 Election Nightmare

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — When the Luzerne County Board of Elections finally approved its motion Wednesday night allowing two ballot drop boxes to be placed ahead of the presidential election in 27 days, there was, oddly, little to no reaction from the people who had spent the past several weeks bickering, complaining and even shouting about drop boxes.

That’s because — even after weeks of debate and an hour of public comment this evening alone —“there was never a doubt” the majority Democratic elections board would eventually vote in favor of the boxes, explained Theodore Fitzgerald, a Republican helping lead the effort against the boxes.

“As far as a secure election and all, we’re not confident because we don’t trust a lot of things in Luzerne County,” Fitzgerald told me after the vote.

Fitzgerald oversees an independent group of grassroots Republicans in the county (resulting in the existence of both the Luzerne County Republicans, which he leads, and the official GOP apparatus, the Republican Party of Luzerne County), and he’s one of at least a dozen activists who show up regularly to board meetings to confront members and drag out public comment sessions.

This week’s meeting of the Luzerne County Board of Elections, its final scheduled meeting before the election, was anything but a sleepy municipal gathering.

Across three-and-a-half hours, the meeting featured one public commenter calling the drop-box supporters “militant fascists and socialists”; some grandstanding by a national GOP activist who said he wants to turn Luzerne County “blood red” for Trump, but “peacefully”; and a threat from the Democratic board chair to throw out a speaker who argued that elections employees should have to take lie detector tests.

“I’m embarrassed,” said attendee Andrea Glod, a retired teacher from Wilkes-Barre, the county seat. “I don’t even know who these people are who are talking. And they keep talking about ‘legitimate comment,’ and it’s to stand up there and say Kamala Harris is — I don’t know even what they’re [saying] now, controlling the weather?”

This is what election administration has turned into in top swing states, ever since Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and falsely blamed it on rigged votes in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump’s disproven claims made local elections boards like Luzerne’s ripe for politicization and chaos, especially as Trump suggests he will contest the results of next month’s election like he did four years ago if he loses again.

Luzerne County, which has become a national symbol of the flight of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party after voting twice for Barack Obama and twice for Trump, is unlikely to decide the election in Pennsylvania — and thus, perhaps, the country — by itself. But the county offers a clear example of the confusion and drama that’s plagued the elections process in many places of national political significance since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2020, the county made headlines when nine military ballots were found discarded in the trash several weeks before the election. A year later, a number of GOP primary ballots featured the wrong header, falsely indicating they were Democratic ballots despite listing the correct Republican candidates. And in 2022, more than a dozen polling sites ran out of paper ballots on Election Day, nearly preventing the county from certifying the results of a close election and prompting a congressional hearing.

The district attorney ended up clearing the county of any criminal wrongdoing in the 2022 incident, blaming it on high staff turnover. Luzerne is on its fifth elections director in five years — a woman who took the job at age 26 and described receiving a comment telling her she should be “drawn and quartered.” Elections staff continue to make minor errors that dominate the local news cycle and give fodder to people who want to argue the county’s elections can’t be trusted.

Luzerne County has also caught the attention of right-wing influencers broadly, including Scott Presler, a MAGA gadfly who made a name for himself organizing against Muslims. Presler claims he and his PAC, Early Vote Action, are why Republicans recently surpassed Democrats in countywide voter registration there. 

“This board has a history of not making sure that every lawful vote is counted here in Luzerne County. That’s why you’re in the news,” Presler, who identified himself as a county resident, said during a public comment session, which he also used to blame Harris for the war in the Middle East.

“Luzerne County is going to vote Republican this November, and we are going to elect Donald Trump,” he promised.

Earlier this month, the ACLU filed suitagainst the Luzerne elections board and the county manager after the county manager announced that drop boxes would not be used in the election due to security concerns. That catapulted the issue of ballot drop boxes to the top of the last board meeting’s agenda. 

“There are many ways to vote,” said Richard Morelli, a GOP board member who voted against allowing the boxes, suggesting they weren’t necessary. “You go back to before COVID, there was no such thing as disenfranchising. The people went out, they voted, they got it done.”

While Democrats broadly support absentee voting, Trump’s own views on it have been hard to pin down since 2020. Trump had once encouraged his supporters to vote via absentee ballot and drop boxes, before changing his tone and calling it “crooked.” Trump’s campaign, though, now seems to realize the folly in telling voters they shouldn’t take advantage of voting in whatever way they can: At a rally last weekend in Butler, the western Pennsylvania city where a gunman tried to kill Trump in July, Trump’s campaign projected a QR code for requesting an absentee ballot on jumbotrons prior to Trump’s remarks.

Wednesday’s board meeting featured plenty of confusion around how mail voting and the mail in general even works. A county resident, tuning in to the meeting over Zoom, suggested drop boxes are necessary because the U.S. Postal Service and Harris were engaged in a conspiracy to … deliver mail ballots to voters. A Democratic board member brushed off concerns about the catastrophic destruction of a drop box and suggested, improbably, that it would be easy to determine whose ballots had been inside.

Jamie Walsh, a GOP state House candidate, told the board he was against the boxes because both sides, but especially Democrats, regularly cheat in elections — even though widespread ballot fraud has never been proven to have occurred in any modern U.S. elections, and especially not with drop boxes.

“There’s a faction of the Democrat party that wants to cheat. I mean, let’s just face it. Let’s call a spade a spade,” Walsh said.

Denise Williams, the Democratic board chair, pointed out that 20% of people who vote absentee in the county use drop boxes because they’re safe. “That’s a significant number, and they’re not doing it for convenience,” she said. “They want it for the security of their mail ballots.” 

Fitzgerald, with the Luzerne County Republicans, described the problem with drop boxes and voting by mail to me using an analogy about domestic violence: “The reason why we don’t like mail-in votes is because of intimidation. There’s a reason why when we vote in person, there’s a drape — because a husband, or wife, whoever could abuse the other, cannot force their spouse, or anybody else, to vote the way they want,” he said. 

The county ultimately decided to allow two of the four drop boxes it typically deploys to be used in next month’s election.  

It’s not clear there’s an immediate endgame for Fitzgerald and the anti-drop box group. Fitzgerald ticked off some objectives that are unlikely to ever materialize, either because they’re impractical or because they’d violate the law — like making sure there’s a Republican for every Democrat hired as an elections employee. He didn’t share plans to back candidates to replace any of the elections board members, some of whose terms are up as soon as next year.

Fitzgerald and the other agitators seemed to relish their combativeness with the board. “Both parties cheat. All people have hyperbole. All people call each other names. We all do it. It’s not one, it’s not the other,” Fitzgerald said.

At least on the question of how long this battle will last, Fitzgerald and Glod, a drop box supporter, seemed to be in agreement.

“This is going to be going on for the next 40 years,” Glod said on her way out of the meeting.