Pennsylvania’s Luzerne county has experienced high-profile mistakes exacerbated by high staff turnover that have been seized on by conspiracy theorists

Emily Cook remembers that she never ate her blueberry muffin.

It was election day in November 2022, and Cook was the deputy director in the election office in Luzerne county, an industrial swath of north-east Pennsylvania. Soon after voting started, Cook started to hear piecemeal reports of a problem at the polls: some locations didn’t have enough paper. When she got to her office, multiple phones were thrust into her hands, each with a crisis. By the time election day was over, she had forgotten about the muffin.

Then came the harassment. In the following weeks, people started showing up at meetings, furious about the incident, believing the mishap had been an intentional effort to suppress the vote (an investigation attributed the problem to human error). Cook and other people in the election office received vile threats.