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A Pennsylvania county that has drawn congressional scrutiny for the way it runs elections continued to experience problems in 2025, despite a stabilization in leadership and changes aimed at preventing errors.
For Luzerne County, the most populous in northeastern Pennsylvania, the issues this year started in October with a mix-up with mail ballots that resulted in the county mistakenly sending 31 voters two ballots.
The county quickly canceled the duplicate ballots and blamed the mishap on a state-run software program.
“It's not a specifically Luzerne County issue,” Emily Cook, the county’s election director, told the local NPR affiliate. “It's not something that we did ourselves.”
The state, however, said the error was on Luzerne’s end.
Despite improvements made after a 2022 ballot paper shortage drew national attention, the county has continued to experience consistent election administration errors, raising questions about whether the county has moved beyond the high-profile mistakes of its past.
Election administration is an almost entirely human-run process, so mistakes occasionally occur. In Chester County, a pollbook printing error this November resulted in thousands of independent and third-party voters being forced to cast provisional ballots.
But Luzerne’s duplicate ballot mix-up was only the first of four issues to vex the county’s election this fall. Furthermore, these four issues came on the heels of several other problems that have plagued the county’s elections since 2020.
Some of those issues — like misspelled candidate names — have been relatively serious and threaten to undermine the public’s trust in elections. But others — like issues with items in poll workers' bags of materials needed to run a voting location — have been more routine, and local officials say the county gets disproportionate criticism for them because of its checkered past.
Luzerne has a history of election problems
Following the turbulent 2020 election, many election offices around the country experienced a high rate of staff turnover. A 2023 analysis by Votebeat and Spotlight PA found that, in Pennsylvania, the more turnover there was in a county’s election director and deputy election director positions, the more the county experienced errors such as ballot misspellings or equipment issues.
That was certainly true in Luzerne County. The cumulative years of experience for the top two officials in the office dropped drastically ahead of the 2020 election. Marisa Crispell, who had served as election director for several years, resigned in 2019 amid ethics questions, and the department’s long-time deputy left just before the 2020 election. A string of roughly half a dozen directors and deputy directors followed, many with little to no election administration experience.
A series of missteps ensued: Ballots were labeled for the wrong party in the 2021 primary; mail ballots transposed the candidate lists for two offices in the 2021 municipal election; and mail ballots listed the wrong number of candidates that fall as well. The county said its election equipment vendor was to blame for all three issues.
The flubs culminated in a dramatic scene during the 2022 midterm elections, when nearly one-third of the county’s precincts ran short on ballot paper on Election Day, and the county scrambled to find more of the specific type of paper needed.
The incident spawned unfounded conspiracy theories that specific precincts had been given less paper because of their political leanings, and a congressional committee later held a hearing on the Luzerne paper shortages.
Luzerne County District Attorney Sam Sanguedolce investigated the cause of the shortage and told Votebeat and Spotlight PA at the time that there was “no question” staff turnover was primarily to blame. No handbook was in place to teach new election directors how to do the job, and the director at the time had spent just one month as deputy director before being promoted, meaning she hadn’t spent much time learning the ropes from her superior.
Luzerne’s problems persisted after turnover stopped
After the paper shortage, leadership in the department somewhat stabilized.
A previous director, Eryn Harvey, came back and led the department for the 2023 primary and general election. Then Cook, who first joined the department in 2021 and served as deputy director during the paper shortage, moved into the director’s role in early 2024 after Harvey departed. That means Luzerne County’s top election official now has more than four years of experience working in election administration, more than many of the other directors since 2019.
However, Luzerne County’s election administration problems have persisted, albeit to a lesser degree than the paper shortage.
During the 2023 municipal elections, mismatched data files resulted in the county needing to void and reissue some mail ballots. Other mail ballots were sent without secrecy envelopes. In the 2024 general election, a candidate’s name was misspelled on ballots sent to nearly 7,000 voters.
This year, beyond the duplicate ballots, Luzerne also had issues with a ballot question being incorrectly worded, poll workers having issues with the cards needed to activate ballots on their voting machines, and mock ballots intended for pre-Election Day equipment testing being discovered in the county’s final results.
The county’s election equipment vendor, the company known as Dominion Voting Systems before it was purchased by Liberty Vote this October, has taken responsibility for some of the mistakes, such as the 2024 misspelling and the mislabeled ballots in 2021.
Cook said in October that this year’s ballot had gone through multiple rounds of proofreading, yet the mistake in the wording of the ballot question went unnoticed. The county has still not provided a complete explanation of how the state’s voter management system resulted in duplicate mail ballots being sent, although the Department of State did say similar issues occurred in other counties.
Neither Cook nor Luzerne County Manager Romilda Crocamo responded to a request for an interview or detailed questions about these and other errors.
Luzerne’s election issues could be a structural problem
Apart from staff turnover, Luzerne County officials pointed to a different possible culprit for the county’s election woes: its unique form of government.
Luzerne is a home-rule county, meaning instead of setting up county government the way most other Pennsylvania counties do, voters in Luzerne opted to create their own governing structure. Instead of putting three elected county commissioners in charge of elections, Luzerne splits election oversight duties between the county council and a board of elections with four members appointed by the council and a fifth selected by the other four members.
John Lombardo, who currently chairs the Luzerne County Council, said that the stress caused by this unusual structure may also be weighing on election officials and affecting their work.
“I think that's one of the drawbacks of the home-rule style of government we have,” he said
“In many cases [for] the employees of the county, they know who their boss is. But if a council member comes to them and asks them a question, they don't know what the end result of that is going to be, a policy change or what.”
Daren Williams, the judge of elections for Ashley Borough’s second ward, agreed. “I wouldn't want to be involved with that,” he said. “No one with two eyes could say they don't think there’s some pressure involved there.”
More importantly, Lombardo said, the arrangement can be confusing for the public because it’s unclear where the ultimate responsibility for election administration lies.
This fall, voters considered a referendum that would have changed the structure of the Luzerne County Board of Elections, but it was rejected.
Officials say Luzerne’s problems get outsized attention
Luzerne County has garnered an outsized number of bad headlines for its election administration since 2020. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it has had more problems than other counties.
Lombardo said he thinks Luzerne County gets a disproportionate amount of media attention, in part due to its past problems, which he thinks contributes to a lingering perception that Luzerne County is error-prone.
“Is all this news reporting on Luzerne because there's so many problems in Luzerne, or is it because it is Luzerne?” he asked. He added that he has heard of similar errors in other counties that didn't make the news.
“I don’t want to say it’s unfair, but to some extent I think a lot of the scrutiny is due to the past issues that we had, not necessarily whether the issue is serious or not.”
At least three newspapers or online outlets, two TV stations, and one radio station regularly cover Luzerne County, making for a higher volume of coverage than many other counties receive. Luzerne County’s position in the politically important northeast part of the state means it often attracts national media coverage as well.
For his part, Williams said he thinks the department has done a good job and resolved issues quickly when they do pop up. He said the consensus among other Luzerne County election judges he speaks with is that the county’s ballot-marking devices are responsible for the most common issues that arise, so he’s happy that the county decided this summer to switch to hand-marked paper ballots.
Lombardo also said that, following the paper shortage, the county implemented changes to hopefully avoid similar mistakes in the future. One was to create a checklist of what needs to be done and when, which the elections bureau staff, county manager, and even council members can see.
He said he has been pleased with Cook’s management of the department as director, and he hopes she will remain in the job.
“Is everything going to be perfect all the time? I don’t know,” he said. “But is it better than it was before? Yes, definitely.”
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.