A Pennsylvania county finds itself at the center of an election denial storm

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. - When it was time for public comments at Luzerne County’s last board of elections meeting before the November vote, Scott Presler was the first to speak.

Presler, an online influencer with a following built around the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, declared he was suing the county over an alleged backlog of voter registrations and mail-in ballot applications.

“That is dangerous to our constitutional republic, and it is disenfranchising the voters that this board represents,” Presler charged. As he took his seat, loud applause and cheers erupted from the overflow seating area outside the room.

Over the more than two hours that followed, at least two dozen people came to the microphone to accuse the county of being unprepared to carry out a fair election. Denise Williams, the board’s chairwoman, sat stone-faced and silent, only letting her face betray her when the attacks turned personal. Williams, she said later, was determined to prove the skeptics wrong.

Trump is already claiming that another election is being rigged against him as he and Vice President Kamala Harris vie for victory in the presidential race. In Pennsylvania, perhaps the most crucial swing state, he and his supporters have homed in on allegations that local election administrators could be undermining the process and can’t be trusted.

“We caught them CHEATING BIG in Pennsylvania,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday, demanding undefined “voter fraud” be investigated and prosecuted.

His most ardent backers, like Presler, have amplified the former president’s unfounded claims that the system is broken.

In places like Luzerne, a once-Democratic coal mining region in northeastern Pennsylvania that has turned red in the Trump era, election officials are determined to prove that the system can withstand the strain. They’re working overtime and calling in reinforcements from other departments to keep the election on track.

Williams, a Democrat, said she can usually remind herself that it’s only a small faction of people who “want to create controversy or sow distress to undermine the confidence in the election, for whatever their reasons may be.” But a few weeks ago, after a particularly contentious board meeting, she cried on her drive home.

“You feel like a punching bag, it feels a little bit like abuse,” Williams said in an interview. But the chairwoman said the board, who are all volunteers, and the staff of the elections department remain convinced they can carry out a “fair, free, accurate, square, accountable election.”

Presler in recent months has focused his followers on Luzerne over what he has suggested is a deliberate attempt to slow the process of Republican voter registration and mail-in ballots requests. Presler, a regular fixture on far-right media, has called the county out during appearances on Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, which has millions of listeners, among other places.

“I’m asking everybody to contact the Luzerne County Board of Elections and demand information and ask them peacefully and ask them sternly, can you tell us with certainty that every single application has been processed and that they are up to date on mail in and voter registration applications,” Presler said on a September “War Room” episode.

Two weeks later he was back on the podcast claiming that what was happening in Luzerne could be happening in other swing counties in Pennsylvania because Democrats would do anything “to install Kamala into office.”

The focus on Luzerne has officials worried about the potential for political violence. County manager Romilda Crocamo had large boulders installed around the downtown Wilkes-Barre government office that houses the Bureau of Elections to deter would-be car bombers or drivers from crashing into the building.

She also said she heeded advice from the Department of Homeland Security not to have drop boxes for ballots because they were easy targets. The decision, she said, had nothing to do with Republican conspiracy theories that drop boxes are tools for cheating, and everything to do with public safety.

“I could not guarantee the people who were using them would be safe,” Crocamo said. “It’s disheartening. It’s demoralizing. It’s very sad that we’re at the point that we’re at, I don’t know how to fix it.”

(Voting rights groups later sued and Crocamo agreed to replace two of the four planned drop boxes.)

Crocamo said the county is trying to be as transparent as possible to preempt claims of election fraud. In 2021, she said, someone on social media spread false claims that she brought a U-haul filled with ballots to the bureau in the middle of the night. This time, she said, there is a live camera feed in the room where ballots are stored and workers will be videotaping the movement of ballots on election night as well as the ballot-opening and counting process.

“Because of people like Scott Presler, who will be spouting lies, we will have the video evidence to show that he and his followers are absolutely wrong,” she said.

Presler, 36, with distinctively long brown hair that flows well past his shoulders, has promoted himself as Republicans’ voter registration savior in Pennsylvania, where Democrats’ longtime registration advantage has slipped - something he takes credit for.

Presler, who has used hashtags for the QAnon extremist ideology in social media posts, was raised in Florida and Virginia and is still registered to vote in Virginia, records show. But he has said he voted this year in Pennsylvania, where he is registered in Beaver County, according to Pennsylvania’s voter registration data. He helped organize “stop the steal” rallies ahead of Jan. 6, 2021, and attended the protest outside the U.S. Capitol as rioters smashed their way into the building. On that day he posted a video of the crowd and called it, “the largest civil rights protest in American history.”

Presler did not respond to several requests for an interview. When approached at the Luzerne elections board meeting, Presler refused to speak to a reporter, saying he did not trust The Washington Post and hoped the media would “learn its lesson” when Trump wins.

In scattered instances across the state in recent days, voting issues have already arisen that have added fuel to election conspiracy theories. Trump and Presler have posted about an issue in Lancaster County where around 2,500 voter registration applications were identified as potentially fraudulent, prompting a criminal investigation. They have also accused Bucks County, a suburban bellwether outside of Philadelphia, of malfeasance after one election office briefly turned voters away while they were waiting to apply for ballots. (A court extended voting there by several days as a result.)

Pennsylvania does not have traditional early voting, but voters may apply in person for an on demand mail-in ballot and cast their vote in the same visit. Many voters - including Republicans who have been told by Trump to mistrust voting through the mail - have done so. That has resulted in long lines and frustrated voters across the state, which has fed allegations of voter disenfranchisement by Trump allies. The accusations come even as the Republican National Committee and others on the right have sued to disqualify mail-in ballots based on technicalities.

Luzerne has been a hub for election conspiracy theories since 2020. It began when a temporary elections worker mistakenly threw away nine military absentee ballots, seven of which were for Trump. They were retrieved and counted, but the damage was done. Trump and his allies seized on the error as evidence of election fraud.

Then, in 2022, several precincts ran out of paper on Election Day. The incident became fodder for a Republican-led congressional committee, which held a hearing called “2022 Midterms Look Back Series: Government Voter Suppression in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.” The county’s district attorney later found high staff turnover in the election department was to blame.

Another blunder gave election deniers fresh ammunition this year when Luzerne had to cancel more than 6,700 ballots already mailed to voters because a state House Republican candidate’s name was off by one letter. The county issued new ballots with the correct spelling, but Trump acolytes seized on the mistake.

“Thirteen days before this historic election, over 6,000 Luzerne County voters are already disenfranchised,” said one woman during the late October elections board meeting, accusing the county of a “repeated assault to our basic right to free and fair elections.”

Republicans control the county government in Luzerne, and even the elected county controller, Walter Griffith, a Republican, joined the barrage of angry comments at the board meeting. He claimed he saw people come in with multiple ballots and chided the board for not demanding a deadline to get registrations processed “so these people are not disenfranchised.”

Rick Morelli, a Republican on the Luzerne elections board, said he had heard from officials at the Republican National Committee asking him about the backlog. He reported back: “We will get them all done.”

“I don’t think there’s anything that has gone wrong here in Luzerne County,” he said. “There’s mistakes. Some of that is just human error. I feel like these things rarely are nefarious.”

That has not stopped Presler, whose attacks on the administration of Luzerne County’s elections continued last week. He seized on a comment made by Crocamo during the recent meeting that “numerous” voter registration applications, some dated back to June, were dropped off on the last day of registration by the county’s former deputy elections director, now the voting and elections manager of Action Together NEPA, a left-leaning group.

Presler declared it a “scoop” and “breaking news” on social media and told his followers to demand an investigation. Elon Musk, the billionaire X owner, reposted and added, “This needs to be investigated!”

Crocamo said there was nothing fraudulent about the two dozen or so applications she referenced.

While Presler did not file a lawsuit, a Republican running for the state House did, alleging the backlog put the “right to vote in jeopardy.”

Meanwhile, after weeks of county workers putting in extended hours and weekends to make sure they were ready, the county got all the voter registration and mail-in ballot applications processed in time.

“Luzerne has this microscope on it and this preconceived notion that Luzerne is going to get it wrong,” Crocamo said. “And that is not reality based.”

Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.