Protective boulders were placed outside the building that houses Luzerne County’s Bureau of Elections. Photo / Ruth Fremson, The New York Times
With the spectre of political violence looming, the Department of Homeland Security has advised hundreds of communities on election safety. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania is at the centre of the unrest.
With northeastern Pennsylvania awash again in the reds and oranges of a dazzling autumn, workers recently planted boulders around a government building in downtown Wilkes-Barre to address a seasonal ugliness. But this was no beautification project.
Luzerne County is bracing for Election Day.
Across the country, the doubts and anger ginned up by the spurious election fraud claims of former President Donald Trump have unsettled the once-routine civic task of collecting and counting votes. With the spectre of political violence looming, the Department of Homeland Security has advised hundreds of concerned communities on election safety.
At the centre of this maelstrom of distrust is Luzerne County, which for some has become Exhibit A for election conspiracy theories. Unnerved by local chatter, county officials have implemented several extraordinary security measures – including a primitive fortification of large rocks around the county building in Wilkes-Barre where the Bureau of Elections is located.
The boulder installation in this swing-state city of 45,000 could serve as a metaphor for the United States of 2024, in which planning for the sacred exercise of democracy might include preparing for a car bomb.
“We’re a microcosm,” said the county manager, Romilda Crocamo, the recipient of repeated threats. The most recent one, serious enough that she alerted law enforcement, was delivered by text to a close relative who is very private and not involved in politics.
“Somebody had to go through a lot of effort to make that connection,” Crocamo said.
Emily Cook, the director of the county’s Bureau of Elections, has also been threatened, both on social media and in person. “People say that I deserved to be executed,” she said.
Luzerne County has endured a lot over the years. The coal-mining prosperity it once enjoyed, reflected in everything from the majestic courthouse to the distinctive Market St Bridge, is long gone. And those who were around in 1972 can hardly forget the Susquehanna River flood that destroyed or damaged thousands of homes and businesses.
All the while, local politics became as unsettled as the Susquehanna’s waters. Last month, for the first time since 1968, registered Republican voters outnumbered registered Democrats, culminating a decade-long trend.
In 2016, after 20 consecutive years of supporting the Democratic presidential candidate, the county overwhelmingly supported Trump. He dominated the local vote again in 2020, even though his opponent and the eventual winner, President Joe Biden, had spent his childhood in nearby Scranton.
A couple of relatively minor election gaffes have stirred up the local political discourse. In September 2020, a Bureau of Elections seasonal employee mistakenly discarded nine military absentee ballots. They were all recovered and counted, with seven cast for Trump and the votes of the remaining two unknown.
The Trump-appointed US attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania quickly announced a criminal investigation and, according to a highly critical review released this year by the Justice Department’s inspector general, shared “selective details” that suggested the worker’s actions were “intentional and likely chargeable criminally”. The internal watchdog said the office did so even though it already knew the worker – who had a mental impairment and was never charged – had simply made a mistake.
Still, the case became a convenient reference in Trump’s false mantra about a stolen election, which sowed suspicion among his supporters about the integrity of the electoral process and its workers, including those in Luzerne County.
As the county’s chief solicitor, Crocamo said she had worked to improve election protocols that ensured a smooth election day in 2021. But after serving as acting county manager for several months, she left the Government in 2022 when divisive politics thwarted her bid to be appointed full-time. “There was a group that protested against me,” said Crocamo, a Democrat. “People were saying I should be thrown off the bridge.”
But early on election day that year, Crocamo began receiving panicked text messages. More than a dozen poll precincts had run out of the paper used to print out completed ballots – and election workers wanted to know where the paper was kept.
“I’d been gone for months,” she recalled.
The paper was eventually delivered, the affected precincts stayed open late, and all votes were tallied. The fallout included a delay in the certification of the results and the resignation of the county manager. It also further fuelled conspiracy theories about deceitful election officials.
After being appointed county manager last year, Crocamo made election security a priority. This decision was prompted by the county’s election-related stumbles, of course, but also by her belief that “there’s a group of people who will resort to violence”.
She hired a consultant to help refine election procedures and contingency plans. And at the request of the new Elections Bureau director, Cook, the county joined a long list of concerned communities that have invited the Department of Homeland Security to assess their election security.
Cait Conley, senior adviser to the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in a statement that it had conducted nearly 1200 assessments and trained more than 30,000 election officials and workers since 2023, with a specific concentration this year on physical security.
“In particular, we recognise that elections officials have seen an unacceptable increase in harassment and threats of violence,” Conley said.
In Luzerne County, one recommendation called for removing the mail ballot drop boxes at four locations, including the county building. Drop boxes have become a flashpoint, with many Republicans contending they can be easily tampered with and many Democrats saying they help people exercise their right to vote.
When Crocamo followed the agency’s recommendation, she received the applause of Republicans and the recriminations of her fellow Democrats, who accused her of suppressing the vote. Sued by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of several voters, she entered into a stipulation agreement and restored the drop boxes.
But Crocamo still harboured what she said were “grave concerns” for the safety of county employees. “Human life first,” she said.
Another recommendation centred on the unusual design of the county building, which – because of the area’s susceptibility to flooding – mostly sits on pillars, with the employee parking lot directly beneath the Bureau of Elections on the second floor.
The county could not afford aesthetically pleasing security measures – no concrete planters. Instead, it spent US$2196 ($3676) this month to have Black Creek Excavation deliver and plant 30 boulders from a local quarry.
Other precautions are being taken. Training in de-escalation tactics. Cellphones updated with panic-button software. The installation of bulletproof glass in the Elections Bureau office. A bullet-resistant film on the first-floor windows so that, as Crocamo put it, “people cannot see in, but you can see out”.
She acknowledged the disturbing optics – the use of rocks, say, to protect a Government building in modern-day America – but said the security measures were a must.
“We have very hardworking people here in Luzerne County, and we historically help each other,” Crocamo, 61, said. “But there is such a divide now, and people are so angry, and – it’s out of control. It’s just out of control.”
She pointed, for example, to the county’s contentious Board of Elections meetings. At one meeting earlier this month, some members of the public spoke reasonably – for or against drop boxes, for example. But others did not hold back, accusing Democrats of being Marxists, accusing Republicans of being racists, refusing to properly identify themselves, demanding that election workers take polygraph tests.
“There’s a faction of the Democrat Party that wants to cheat,” one man asserted. “Let’s just face it.”
Crocamo grew up in Hazleton, 50km south of Wilkes-Barre. She said she came from a politically divided but loving Italian family. She follows tennis, wears a Marvel superheroes lanyard around her neck and endures threats.
Does it bother her?
“If you talk to my partner, yes,” she said.
But does it bother her?
“It does,” she said. “But I have to get up, and I have to do my job. And I’m going to do my job.”
On the county building’s second floor, Cook shared similar sentiments in an office undergoing security renovations in preparation for Election Night, when precinct officials and deputy sheriffs will drop off votes to be counted.
Cook, 27, grew up in Wilkes-Barre and studied for a career in early-childhood education but followed her passion for the civic wonder that is the right to vote. She began at the Bureau of Elections as an administrative assistant, survived the internal tumult and now oversees an operation that, on Election Day, will include 1200 poll workers at 186 precincts.
And, yes, Cook said, she has been repeatedly threatened – enough times to begin dulling the shock – including being told that she deserved to be drawn and quartered. “Which is one that you don’t hear quite often,” she said. “So that one sticks out.”
Cook said she embraced the First Amendment right to free speech, though with a caveat. “You have a right to stand at a public meeting and say you think I’m screwing up the department,” she said. “But what shouldn’t be allowable is saying, ‘I think you’re screwing up the department, and I think you should die because of it.’”
And so Cook, Crocamo and their colleagues gird for what was once a day of civic celebration, set aside for American citizens to cast votes and help chart the future of their community, their state, their country.
Now, in places like Luzerne County, anxiety tempers the joy. Those committed to the integrity of the day will still be at their posts, only behind bulletproof glass, panic buttons within reach.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Dan Barry
Photographs by: Ruth Fremson
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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