Why do election problems keep plaguing Luzerne Co.?
She may not have known it, but on Nov. 8, Beth Gilbert McBride was experiencing a Luzerne County election tradition. Or perhaps a curse.
Gilbert McBride, who had become acting director of elections just three months earlier, started hearing a trickle of reports in the morning about precincts running out of ballot paper. As the day dragged on, dozens of precincts would report a shortage. Some said they had to turn voters away for lack of paper to use in Luzerne’s ballot-on-demand printers.
Gilbert McBride and her election staff tried to keep track of the affected locations on a movable whiteboard as she rushed around the office trying to deal with the crisis. The county scrambled to order paper from a supplier, and reams piled up next to the office Pepsi machine, awaiting delivery to the triaged list of 44 precincts. As the situation worsened, a local judge stepped in to order that polls stay open two hours late.
By the end of the day, Luzerne would be singled out by the Department of State as the only county with significant voting problems during an otherwise smooth midterm Election Day for Pennsylvania.
The exact cause of the paper shortage has yet to be disclosed. The local district attorney is investigating but has yet to release his findings, and neither Gilbert McBride nor the
County Board of Elections has offered detailed explanations to the many residents who have demanded answers.
Gilbert McBride declined to be interviewed for this story.
What is clear is that the incident was not Luzerne’s first problem during an election and Gilbert McBride is not the first election director to oversee voting there with no prior experience.
Luzerne has cycled through election directors and other staff over the past several years, leading to an immense loss of institutional knowledge and making it an outlier even in an industry that has seen accelerating turnover.
This loss of knowledge, say current and former county officials and longtime election observers, resulted in another Luzerne election debacle. The deeper cause, they tell Votebeat and Spotlight PA, is the county’s unique government structure, low pay, and the stress on election workers.
“A lot of these are attributable to human error — in fact all these things in one form or another,” said Bob Morgan, who served as election director for eight months in 2021. “But part of it is exacerbated by people just leaving and the next person just kind has to figure things out by themselves and there is no formal training program.”
Gilbert McBride, who is also a member of WilkesBarre City Council, was brand new to the election office when she started as deputy director in July. One month later, her boss was out the door, having served only eight months himself. With the midterms just
around the corner, Gilbert McBride was temporarily promoted.
Last week, however, the County Council announced one change it hopes will put county elections back on track: another new elections director, with Gilbert McBride returning to the deputy position.
Turnover and trip-ups
Luzerne’s high turnover in elections leadership began in 2019 when Marisa Crispell, who had previously worked for the department and had experience running elections
elsewhere, resigned amid ethics questions. Crispell did not return a call seeking comment.
Since then, the county has had a succession of four elections directors, plus acting director Gilbert McBride. Since the August 2020 resignation of longtime deputy director MaryBeth Steininger, the county has also had five deputy directors.
One of those deputies was Eryn Harvey, who resigned after less than a year to run unsuccessfully for state representative — and now is Luzerne’s new hire for the top elections job. Harvey did not respond to a request for comment. Harvey was succeeded by a deputy, Sarah Knoell, who stayed roughly three months in the job, which was then filled by Gilbert McBride.
An analysis of data provided by the county shows the precipitous loss of experience. During the 2016 through 2019 elections, staff in the department had a median of 17 to 22 years of service. That number fell to roughly one year of median experience in 2020 and in 2021, when the November election was administered without a formal director in place.
The November midterm election was run by a staff with a median of 1.5 years experience.
On top of the turnover in the elections department itself, the county has also gone through a number of county managers, who help oversee the department. The latest county manager, Randy Robertson, resigned in November after just six months on the job.
The turnover has led to problems.
During the 2020 election, a worker in Luzerne improperly threw out nine ballots, an incident then-President Donald Trump seized upon to sow doubt in mail voting. The U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania later said there was no criminal intent, and the Pennsylvania Department of State said the mistake was due to poor training.
The director had less than a year of experience at the time.
Then, during the May 2021 primary, Republican ballots displayed on voting machine screens were mistakenly labeled as Democratic. A new director and deputy director had just been hired.
In the November election that year, which was run without a director in place, there were errors in printed ballots that had not been caught, two flash drives with votes on them were not uploaded in a timely manner, and mail ballots were sent out very late.
In April 2022, more than 300 ballots were delivered late during a special election, though the Department of State took the blame for that error.
Robertson did not return a call seeking comment, but in a December interview with a local newspaper he repeated his desire for the county to study the “root cause” of election office turnover, which he suggested in July could be due to pay.
Luzerne’s last four directors have been paid $64,500, which is the lowest salary compared to peers in similarly sized counties in the U.S., according to a 2022 survey of local elections officials by Democracy Fund and the Elections and Voting Information Center at Reed College.
Robertson also noted that the home rule structure has caused issues.
A tug-of-war over elections
In most Pennsylvania counties, elected commissioners also sit on county election boards that set rules for elections, such as whether to use drop boxes. But Luzerne is different.
In 2010, the county opted for a form of government few other counties have chosen, home rule. The option allows counties to write their own charter instead of following the state’s established rules for how counties are to organize their government.
This can mean elections are overseen by two masters. One is the county board of elections, whose four members — always two Democrats and two Republicans — are appointed by the county council. Those four members then elect a fifth resident as chair.
But it is the county council which controls the election department’s budget and hires the county manager, who hires and supervises the election director.
This has often led to disputes between the two bodies, including a fracas over control in 2021, when two Republican election board members attempted to elect a chairman who was also a Republican county council member. The county’s charter expressly prohibits elected county officials from serving on the elections board, and the attempt resulted in the two board members being removed.
More recently, the council proposed prohibiting county employees or funds from being used to place drop boxes in an effort to stop their use, despite the elections board’s decision to
continue using drop boxes.
“The difficulty have is the council thinks you should take your direction from them, and the election board thinks you should take your direction from them, and you’re pretty much certain to make everyone unhappy at some point,” said Morgan, the former election director.
Morgan said he thinks council members feel “they get the blame” when things go wrong and so they face pressure to act, even though they don’t have the same authority their colleagues in non-home rule counties might have.
Election directors in Luzerne have sometimes had a very contentious relationship with members of the bodies overseeing them. Shelby Watchilla, a former elections director who oversaw the 2020 election and resigned shortly after it, sued the county and a council member for defamation over comments they made about her handling of the department. The case is ongoing, and the council member at the heart of the dispute resigned in January 2022 to take office as county controller.
“Number one, the pay is not worth what is demanded I think that it is a hostile work environment,” said Alisha Hoffman-Mirilovich, executive director of the local progressive group Action Together NEPA.