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      Amid a Fraught Process, Penn Museum Entombs Remains of 19 Black People

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      Skulls from a collection used to further racist science have been laid to rest. Questions surrounding the interment have not.There was very little that could be said about the 19 people who were eulogized on Saturday morning in a service at the University of Pennsylvania. Their names were lost, and not much about their lives was known beyond the barest facts: an old age spent in the poorhouse, a problem with cavities. They were Black people who had died in obscurity over a century ago, now known almost entirely by the skulls they left behind. Even some of these scant facts have been contested.Much more could be said about what led to the service. “This moment,” said the Rev. Jesse Wendell Mapson, a local pastor involved in planning the commemoration and interment of the 19, “has not come without some pain, discomfort and tension.”On this everyone could agree.The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, like cultural and research institutions worldwide, has been grappling with a legacy of plunder, trying to decide what to do about artifacts and even human bones that were collected from people and communities against their will and often without their knowledge.Human remains, which are in the repositories of institutions all across the country, present a particularly delicate challenge. The Samuel G. Morton Cranial Collection, which has been at the Penn Museum since 1966, is an especially notorious example, with more than a thousand skulls gathered in furtherance of vile ideas about race.Drummers at the start of the commemoration service at the Penn Museum on Saturday.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesThe museum plans to repatriate hundreds of craniums from all over the world, but the process has been fraught from the beginning. Its first step — the entombment at a nearby cemetery of the skulls of Black Philadelphians found in the collection — has drawn heavy criticism, charged by activists and some experts with being rushed and opaque.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Fetterman Endorses Andy Kim in High-Stakes New Jersey Senate Primary

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      The Pennsylvania senator, the first among his colleagues to weigh in on the primary battle to oust the indicted Senator Robert Menendez, said he had concerns about Tammy Murphy’s G.O.P. history.Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania is endorsing Representative Andy Kim of New Jersey in the primary to unseat Senator Bob Menendez, the embattled veteran Democrat who is under indictment in a federal corruption case, taking the rare step of wading into a high-stakes intraparty fight to oust a colleague.Mr. Fetterman, the harshest Democratic critic of Mr. Menendez in Congress, who has repeatedly called on him to resign, is the first sitting senator to endorse any candidate in the race. In an interview, he explained his decision to intervene in a primary to take out a fellow sitting senator, stating bluntly that “anything would be an upgrade over Menendez.”Mr. Kim, a three-term congressman representing a southern New Jersey district that former President Donald J. Trump won twice, is running for the seat against Tammy Murphy, the first lady of New Jersey and a first-time candidate who is a former registered Republican. Ms. Murphy has locked up much of the institutional support in a state where county leaders hold enormous power in primary campaigns, but has struggled to gain grass-roots traction.Mr. Kim is leading by double digits in some recent polls.In an interview, Mr. Fetterman said that he was “enthusiastic” about Mr. Kim and that Ms. Murphy’s political background — she changed her party affiliation from Republican to Democrat only in 2014 — gave him pause.“One of the most important things is that we have a reliable Democratic vote,” Mr. Fetterman said. “We have to run this table in ’24 in order to maintain the majority. But we need to count on every Democratic vote. Andy Kim is the kind of guy we can count on.”Mr. Fetterman said Ms. Murphy was likely “a lovely woman, but the last time I had to deal with a Republican from New Jersey, that was my own race.” Mr. Fetterman in 2022 defeated Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate whom he trolled relentlessly as a celebrity carpetbagger from the Garden State.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      The Smoothie Stop-By: When a President Tries to Be a Regular Joe

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      For a commander in chief, retail campaigning isn’t easy, what with the counterassault team that follows him everywhere. But President Biden is starting to hit the hustings on every Main Street he can find.It was a quiet day in Emmaus, Pa. The only sound on Main Street was the idling engine of the sleek black truck that some call a rolling doomsday communications control center, which was parked outside the bike shop. The men with guns dressed all in black were perched on the roof using binoculars to scan the area for terrorists or other bad guys.The president had come to this picturesque town of 11,000 to chat with a few local business owners, order a smoothie, visit the local firehouse and, if it so happened that his visit produced a few pictures useful for his re-election campaign, all the better. Did he mention the new statistics on start-up businesses? No worries, he would be happy to repeat them.An election year has arrived, and it is time for President Biden to get out of the White House and hit the road for votes. He is not the only one looking for Norman Rockwell images in small-town shops and diners these days — check out the traveling circus in Iowa over the weekend, heading to New Hampshire after that. But he is the only one who comes with a mile-long motorcade of police cars, Secret Service vehicles, ambulances and enough sophisticated military hardware to launch a nuclear war from the stool at the coffee shop.Retail campaigning is not easy when you’re the commander in chief. The counterassault team does not really lend an air of authentic spontaneity to the whole venture. The venues he visits are chosen in advance, the route he takes is chosen in advance, the people he meets are chosen in advance. If it’s possible, a significant chunk of the town is roped off. Nothing says “hey, friend” like a metal-detecting wand and a bomb-sniffing dog.But artificial and surreal as it may be, allies have been agitating for Mr. Biden to get on the hustings, away from the Beltway and the Situation Room. He has, after all, spent a lifetime working rooms, shaking hands, slapping arms, squeezing shoulders, kissing babies. His Uncle Joe connection with everyday people, allies argue, is perhaps his biggest political superpower.Mr. Biden stopped by Hannibal’s Kitchen in Charleston, S.C., last week.Pete Marovich for The New York Times“This is exactly the kind of area the president should be visiting,” said Representative Susan Wild, Democrat of Pennsylvania, who accompanied him to Emmaus on Friday and whose swing district is rated a tossup by The Cook Political Report. “This is quintessential Middle America — even though we’re not in the middle of America.”The worry is that Mr. Biden has lost Middle America, or at least a critical chunk of it, thanks to inflation or his age or the problems at the border or whatever. If he wants to win those voters back in November, Democrats say, he needs to show that he still understands where they are coming from and has a better sense of their interests than his challengers.And so the president began last week by dropping by Hannibal’s Kitchen in Charleston, S.C., a down-home soul-food restaurant known for its crab and shrimp rice and decidedly unfancy environs. (“What the restaurant lacks in ambience, they more than make up for in taste,” according to its own website.) He ended the week by dropping by a few shops in Emmaus, which boasts of being ranked the fifth-most “heart-warmingly beautiful small town in Pennsylvania.”Mr. Biden sought to claim credit for an improving economy, highlighting that more new small businesses have opened in his three years in office than during the term of his predecessor and possible opponent, former President Donald J. Trump. He attributed low poll ratings for his economic record to challenges communicating with voters.“If you notice, they’re feeling much better about how the economy is doing,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the Allentown Fire Training Academy north of Emmaus on Friday. “What we haven’t done is let them know exactly who got it changed.”When hunting for votes, Mr. Biden has a well-worn shtick, honed during campaigns going back to his first bid for office in 1970, before many of the people he runs into were even born.“Hey, bud, how you doing, man?” he asks.“How you doing, man? My name’s Joe.”“Good to see you, man.”Mr. Biden on Friday at South Mountain Cycle in Emmaus, a town in a battleground state that has a Main Street with small businesses that look universal.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesHe has a collection of hokey jokes for every occasion. When he greeted L.J. Huger, the owner of Hannibal’s, he noted the two younger women standing next to him and joked, “Do you know these women?” Mr. Huger, of course, did. They were his daughters and they run the place now. “I’m the old patriarch,” he explained to the president, “like you.”Mr. Biden employs another old standby when he meets a young child, as he did in the bike shop in Emmaus. “What are you? Seventeen?” the president asked playfully. No, the boy said. “Seven.”When he enters a room, Mr. Biden sometimes does a faux double-take and says “oh!” pretending to be surprised to see the people his White House has arranged to be there.In picking Emmaus, founded in 1759 and pronounced ee-MAY-us, the Biden White House found a town in a battleground state with, yes, a Main Street with small businesses that look universal.Sean Linehan, one of the owners of Emmaus Run Inn, a shoe and athletic apparel store, said he got a call on Tuesday night telling him the president might come. He was allowed to invite three staff members, three good customers and his wife, Nicole. “It was really cool,” Mr. Linehan recalled later by telephone. “We talked about everything. He was very personable, very gracious with his time.”Mr. Biden, wearing a green quarter-zip sweater under a blue blazer with elbow patches, knew that Mr. Linehan had bought a shoe store in Delaware; he even knew the previous owner. When the president asked if he ever got down to that store, Mr. Linehan said yes. Mr. Biden took out a pen and paper and asked for his number just in case he could drop by.Mr. Biden talking with employees of Emmaus Run Inn.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesStill, in today’s polarized era, a visit by the president generates strong feelings. “I got a couple emails from people,” Mr. Linehan said. “One guy said he’ll never shop in our store. ‘You should never mix business and politics.’ I emailed back. I said we didn’t talk about politics. We talked about the benefits of small businesses.”Maybe some of the emailers were watching because when Mr. Biden left the shoe store to walk next door to South Mountain Cycle store and the adjoining Nowhere Coffee Company, a few people on a nearby balcony hanging a “Let’s Go Brandon” banner started shouting, “Go home, Joe!” and “You’re a loser!”He got it from the other side of the ideological spectrum about an hour later when he visited the fire station in nearby Allentown as several dozen demonstrators protesting Israel’s war against Hamas chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Genocide Joe has got to go” and held up signs like “No Vote for Genocide Joe” and “We Will Remember in November.”Oddly enough, he did not stop at Grandpa Joe’s Candy Shop just a few doors down from the bike store. The serendipity seemed irresistible: Grandpa Joe visits Grandpa Joe’s! But he resisted, maybe not wanting to emphasize the whole grandfather thing in a contest where his age is an issue.“We had our fingers crossed, but no, unfortunately,” Chris Beers, the owner, said the next day. “It would have been awesome.”Mr. Biden’s visit to Emmaus drew a crowd.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesBy early evening, it was time to head back to Washington and the White House. Just the night before, American forces at the president’s command had conducted airstrikes against Houthi militias in Yemen, and what Mr. Biden’s hosts did not know was that more were coming that night. That’s the presidency in an election year, schmoozing with a bike shop owner one minute, life-or-death decisions the next. More

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      Biden to start election year with speech on third anniversary of Capitol attack

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      Joe Biden will on Friday mark the third anniversary of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, delivering his first presidential election campaign speech of 2024 at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania – a site replete with historical meaning.A day before the anniversary, due to forecast bad weather, Biden will speak where George Washington’s army endured another dark moment: the bitter winter of 1777-78, an ordeal key to winning American independence from Britain.Biden will also speak about January 6 on Monday at the Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, where in June 2015 a gunman shot dead nine Black people in an attempt to start a race war.Donald Trump’s nearest challenger for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, was governor of South Carolina at the time and subsequently oversaw the removal of the Confederate battle flag from statehouse grounds.Haley has since struggled to define her position on the flag and the interests it represented, last week in New Hampshire failing to say slavery caused the civil war.But the Biden campaign is focusing on Trump, who refused to accept his conclusive defeat in 2020, spreading the lie that he was denied by electoral fraud and ultimately encouraging supporters to attempt to stop certification of Biden’s win by Congress.The attack on the Capitol delayed certification but the process was completed in the early hours of 7 January. Biden was inaugurated two weeks later.On Thursday, the Biden campaign previewed his Valley Forge speech and released Cause, an ad one adviser said would “set the stakes” for this year’s election.“I’ve made the preservation of American democracy the central issue of my presidency,” Biden says in the ad, over footage of Americans voting.But, he adds, over shots of white supremacists marching in Virginia in 2017 and the attack on Congress, “There’s something dangerous happening in America. There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy.”Wes Moore, the first Black governor of Maryland, widely seen as a possible Democratic presidential candidate in 2028 but now a Biden campaign adviser, told MSNBC: “The president is really setting the stakes and really hoping to set the platform for what people are going to hear.“From him, it is a vision for their future. From Donald Trump, they’re going to hear a vision about his future. That’s the difference.”Less than two weeks from the Iowa caucuses, Trump dominates Republican polling, regardless of 91 criminal charges – 17 concerning election subversion – in four cases, civil trials over his business affairs and a rape allegation and attempts to bar him from the ballot in Colorado and Maine under the 14th amendment, introduced after the civil war to stop insurrectionists running for office.Trump has called January 6 “a beautiful day” and supporters imprisoned because of it “great, great patriots” and “hostages”. At rallies he has played Justice for All, The Star-Spangled Banner sung by jailed rioters, interspersed with his own recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. On Saturday, he will stage a rally in Iowa, less than five days before caucuses in the midwestern state kick off the 2024 election.Republicans in Congress continue to range themselves behind Trump, the majority whip Tom Emmer’s endorsement this week completing the set of GOP House leaders. Among the rank and file, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right representative from Georgia who has touted herself as Trump’s running mate, was due to host a January 6 commemoration in Florida, until the venue canceled it.Many observers see winning the White House as Trump’s best hope of staying out of prison. Some polling suggests a criminal conviction (also possible over retention of classified information and hush-money payments) would reduce support but for now he is competitive with Biden or leads him in surveys regarding a notional general election.Furthermore, polling shows more Americans accepting Trump’s stolen election lie.This week, the Washington Post and the University of Maryland found that only 62% of respondents said Biden’s 2020 win was legitimate, down from 69% two years ago. On the question of blame for January 6, meanwhile, the same pollsters found that 25% of Americans (and 34% of Republicans) thought it was probably or definitely true that the FBI, not Trump, was responsible for inciting the riot.Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, referred to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan when she said: “Led by Donald Trump, Maga Republicans are running on an extreme platform of undermining the will of the American people who vote in free and fair elections, weaponising the government against their political opponents, and parroting the rhetoric of dictators.”Biden’s new ad and January 6 speeches, Chavez Rodriguez said, would “serve as a very real reminder that this election could very well determine the very fate of American democracy”.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Biden to Set Stakes for 2024 Election in Pennsylvania Speech

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      President Biden is returning to the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Friday to try to define the 2024 presidential election as an urgent and intensifying fight for American democracy.Mr. Biden is expected to use a location near the famous Revolutionary War encampment of Valley Forge and the looming anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to cast preserving democracy as a foundational issue to the 2024 campaign, according to a senior Biden aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the remarks.The address, which builds on previous speeches about safeguarding American institutions and combating political violence, represents a bet that many Americans remain shaken by the Jan. 6 attack and Donald J. Trump’s role in it.Leaning on a phrase used by America’s first president, George Washington, around the time he commanded troops at Valley Forge, Mr. Biden is expected to suggest that the 2024 election is a test of whether democracy is still a “sacred cause” in the nation, the aide said.Mr. Biden is fond of using sites of historical significance to underscore speeches that he and his team see as important moments. He traveled to Independence Hall in Philadelphia before the midterm elections and to Gettysburg, Pa., during the 2020 presidential campaign.His campaign views the events of Jan. 6 — when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a violent culmination of his election denialism — as critical to understanding how the 2024 campaign will unfold. His team notes that Mr. Trump and Republicans have tried to rewrite the history of that day but argues that images of the Capitol riot remain seared in the minds of voters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      John Fetterman: social media made battle with depression more difficult

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      Social media made John Fetterman’s battle with mental depression last year even more difficult, the Democratic US senator from Pennsylvania said Sunday.Fetterman said the comments on social media about him and his family played a role in the depression which sent him to a hospital for six weeks in February. “It’s an accelerant, absolutely,” he said.The first-term senator added: “It’s just astonishing that so many people want to take the time to hop online and to say things to a stranger that never did anything to you – especially members of my family.”Fetterman’s blunt remarks about his depression, the resulting hospitalization, and the effect of social media came during an exclusive interview with NBC’s Meet the Press that the news program aired Sunday.In the pre-recorded conversation with Meet the Press host Kristen Welker, Fetterman said virtually everyone he knew advised him to stay off social media after he defeated Republican celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz for an open Senate seat in November of 2022.Fetterman – once the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, and the ex-lieutenant governor of the state – triumphed despite vocal support for Oz from former president Donald Trump.Victory for Fetterman helped give his party control of the Senate and cemented him as a rising star among leftists. And Fetterman, 54, said he subsequently “made the mistake to check … out” social media commentary several weeks after defeating Oz.Fetterman said he felt how doing so palpably worsened the dread he experienced whenever he pondered being sworn in on 3 January 2023 – thoughts that accompanied a sudden weight loss and lack of physical energy to get out of bed at the time.“It wasn’t the things said … but it was the volume, just the, like, where is this coming from?” Fetterman said Sunday. “And it’s like, is this [what it] would be the rest of my life? Look what it’s done to me, and more importantly what has this done for my family?”Fetterman has previously said his depressive symptoms at the time prevented him from engaging in the usual banter or work discussions with his staff, and he began avoiding spending time with his wife, Gisele, and their three children.Ultimately, on 15 February, which was his son’s 14th birthday, Fetterman admitted himself into the Walter Reed medical center for clinical depression treatment.He remained there six weeks, which is longer than typical for inpatient treatment for depression. And the hospital stay also came after Fetterman suffered a stroke that he says nearly killed him during his Senate campaign. The earlier medical ordeal also required him to be hospitalized for a time, and Republicans pointed at the episode to argue that he was unfit for office.Fetterman told Welker in Sunday’s interview that he feared his time in politics was all but over after his mental health hospitalization.“I had assumed that would be the end of my career,” said Fetterman, who wore his usual uniform of a black hooded sweatshirt and matching shorts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Fetterman has won praise for being transparent about his mental health care, with experts saying it could inspire people who need similar aid to overcome their reluctance about seeking it out. He recently earned flattering news coverage by vowing to block the multibillion-dollar sale of US Steel to the Japanese company Nippon Steel, in no small part because Braddock is home to a major US Steel plant.Furthermore, he drew headlines by sending US senator Bob Menendez, who is facing federal corruption charges, a $200 Cameo message from George Santos, the expelled former congressman who is grappling with his own pending fraud-related criminal counts.Fetterman on Sunday pledged to continue discussing his bout with depression as long “as that conversation helps”.“It’s a risk that I wanted to take because I wanted to help people … know that I don’t want them to suffer the way … I’ve been,” Fetterman said.Additionally, Fetterman characterized his social media use as selective now that his depression has been in remission, and he encouraged viewers to consider adopting a similar approach.“I would just warn anybody … I’ve never noticed anyone to believe that their mental health has been supported by spending any kind of time on social media,” Fetterman said. “And if they do, I’d love to meet that person.” More

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      Senator John Fetterman vows to block ‘outrageous’ $14.9bn US Steel sale

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      The US senator John Fetterman has vowed to block the multibillion-dollar sale of US Steel to the Japanese company Nippon Steel, calling the potential deal “outrageous”.The former mayor of the south-west Pennsylvania town of Braddock, which is home to a major US Steel plant, Fetterman has long advocated for the rights of American steel workers and positioned himself as a pro-union Democrat.In the video posted to X and taken from the roof of his house in Braddock, which overlooks the plant, Fetterman criticized the proposed $14.9bn sale, decrying US Steel for selling itself “to a foreign nation and company”.“Steel is always about security,” Fetterman said. “And I am committed to anything I can do, from using my platform or my position, in order to block this.“I’m going to fight for the steelworkers and their union way of life here as well, too.”The acquisition was announced on Monday and saw US Steel’s stock price jump 25%. The company confirmed the deal in a statement on Tuesday, saying its board unanimously approved the acquisition and calling Nippon Steel “a global leader in steelmaking, innovation and decarbonization”.The United Steelworkers (USW) union, meanwhile, denounced Nippon Steel for agreeing to an acquisition deal without prior approval from the union, Axios reported.David McCall, the president, called the deal “greedy” and a “violation” of a union agreement that requires any buyer of US Steel to agree to a new labor agreement prior to any sale.“Neither US Steel nor Nippon reached out to our union regarding the deal, which is in itself a violation of our partnership agreement that requires US Steel to notify us of a change in control or business conditions,” McCall told Axios, calling the sale “shortsighted”.A previous buyout offer in August, worth $7.3bn, by rival company Cleveland Cliffs, was rejected by US Steel. That offer did have the support of the USW union, which praised the Ohio-based Cleveland Cliffs as being “in the best position to ensure that US-based manufacturing remains strong in this country”, and noted it didn’t cut jobs during previous acquisitions in 2019 and 2020. More

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      Exodus of election officials in one county rings alarm for US democracy

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      It was the perfect story and Donald Trump pounced.In the final weeks of the 2020 election, officials in Luzerne county in north-east Pennsylvania had discovered nine mail-in ballots in the trash. Several of them were cast in favor of Trump, who had been railing for months that the election was rigged against him. William Barr, then the attorney general, briefed Trump on the matter before it was public and Trump immediately began spinning it.“They were Trump ballots – eight ballots in an office yesterday in – but in a certain state and they were – they had Trump written on it, and they were thrown in a garbage can. This is what’s going to happen,” Trump said at the time. In an unusual move, the justice department quickly announced it was investigating the matter. Months later, it would announce the incident was caused by human error.Several months later there was a new election director in place. But there was also a new problem. When Republicans went to the voting machine in the primaries, a header popped up on their ballot telling them they were voting an “official Democratic ballot”.When the midterm elections came around in 2022, there was another new election director . Again, there was a problem. Just after the polls opened, many precincts quickly reported they did not have enough paper to feed the voting machines, prompting delays and forcing some voters to be turned away.All three incidents were caused by unintentional human error, exacerbated by a high level of turnover in the election office of a politically competitive county in a battleground state. (Trump won the county by 14 points in 2020, a five-point drop from his 2016 margin.) Between 2016 and 2019, the median experience for staffers in the office was between 17 and 22 years, according to an analysis by the news outlet Votebeat, which has reported extensively on the election office’s turnover. In 2022, the median level of experience was just 1.5 years.“It’s a good example of an office that hasn’t been invested in and it shows,” said Jennifer Morrell, the CEO and co-founder of The Elections Group, an election administration consultancy that worked with Luzerne county to improve processes in 2021. “I think there are a lot of other offices like that maybe haven’t had the public problems, but it’s probably because they’re kind of holding things together by a thread. Or more likely by duct tape.”While the turnover in Luzerne county has been exceptionally high, it is emblematic of a larger crisis facing American elections. Experienced election officials, long underresourced and underpaid, are leaving the profession as they face a wave of threats and harassment, seeded by Trump and allies who have spread the myth that US election results can’t be trusted. About 20% of local election officials are projected to be working their first presidential election in 2024, according to an April survey by the Brennan Center for Justice. Nearly 70 election directors or assistant directors in 40 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties have left since 2020, according to Al Schmidt, the secretary of state.With this exodus comes a massive loss of institutional knowledge. The people who know exactly how to proof a ballot, test election machines, or troubleshoot problems on election day won’t be there. The result is a toxic cycle, where a lack of experience produces human error, fueling distrust in elections and anger, then pushing election officials to leave.“Any wrinkle in an election process is immediately the subject of conspiracy theories,” said Robert Morgan, who served as Luzerne county’s election director for most of 2021 and was in the role when the ballot header issue occurred. “If you experience that level of turnover, there is a concern that you may not be as experienced, and you may not have handled this, or handled something this large, and yes, that doesn’t help. That doesn’t build confidence.”As the county heads into another election year, it’s under the magnifying glass. Officials know that any error can lead to more distrust and skepticism of elections. The county is now seeking to improve its internal election processes to regain trust of its residents.“There’s certain things that we can’t control. But what we need to do is make sure that we prepare for everything that we can control,” Romilda Crocamo, the county manager, said. “We still hear from people who don’t trust the election. And you’re not going to get people’s trust overnight. We’re going to have to have a series of clean elections.”As the justice department investigation found, for example, the ballots Trump seized on in 2020 weren’t discarded because of a nefarious plot to steal the election, but rather because a temporary worker who had been on the job for a few days made a mistake. The worker appeared not to realize they were military ballots, which can arrive in different envelopes than regular mail-in votes and discarded them. The discarded ballots were quickly discovered by Shelby Watchilla, the county’s director of elections. Federal prosecutors and the FBI would later say there was no evidence of criminal intent.Still, the damage was done. After the ballots were disclosed, Walter Griffith, a county councilman, had organized a protest outside the county office and criticized Watchilla as incompetent. She resigned in December, shortly after she filed a defamation lawsuit against Griffith.Public meetings of the election board became more heated in the aftermath of the 2020 election. “There were no filters for some people. They would immediately assume everybody was incompetent in the process and that sort of stuff because of what had happened in 2020,” said Morgan, who took over in 2021. “And you know it’s tough to operate in an environment like that.”Recent election directors in Luzerne county have also been paid $64,500 per year, according to Votebeat, among the lowest salaries in similarly sized counties across the country. “You’re making $65,000 and you’re going to work and people are publicly abusing you? And you’re receiving threats. That’s not an incentive to get out of bed and get to the office,” Crocamo said.And as distrust built after the discarded ballots in 2020, another error from the election office only further escalated mistrust.When Morgan started his job as the election director in 2021, the elections office was already in the process of proofing the ballot for the upcoming primary. There wasn’t a manual or protocol to follow.“It was basically an oral history tradition. It was a little frustrating. Because sometimes the stories weren’t told in the order they might have been otherwise,” he said. “I knew a lot of things, but I didn’t know anywhere near all the things that needed to go into it. It’s a huge logistical process.”When election day for the primary came around, Morgan made a mistake. When a representative of Dominion programmed the county’s election machines, Morgan didn’t catch that the representative had programmed the first page of all ballots to say it was a Democratic ballot. Polls opened at 7am and by 7.15am the office was swamped with phone calls. “That was not fun,” Morgan said.“We should have caught it. But we didn’t. You never proofread your own work and a lot of times when you proofread you’re looking for the highlights,” he added. “The problem is in a heightened situation where people don’t feel you’re credible and you make a simple error like that and it just lights the fire for everything everyone thought they were getting cheated by last time.”Morgan resigned that fall to take another job, a decision that he said was unrelated to any harassment he faced.By November of last year, Beth Gilbert McBride, a city councilperson in Wilkes-Barre, was running the elections office. She started as a deputy in July 2022 and took over three months before election day when the elections director stepped down, according to Votebeat. Weeks before election day, the deputy director texted McBride that the county was low on paper but probably would be OK for the election. McBride said she would order more paper.That order never materialized and shortly after polls opened, several precincts reported they were running low on paper. County officials initially delivered extra paper from a warehouse to precincts with a shortage, but then had to take it back when a Dominion representative expressed concern it might not work with the machine. The county ultimately had to make a same-day order for the correct paper.There were immediate accusations that the paper issue was an attempt to suppress the vote in Republican areas of the county. Republicans on the elections board refused to certify the election, causing the county to miss the state’s certification deadline (it ultimately certified after a lawsuit). The accusations went national – the US House administration committee held a hearing in March of this year focused on the paper shortage that was titled: “Government Voter Suppression in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.” Representative Bryan Steil, a Republican from Wisconsin, said that one-third of precincts had been turned away.But an extensive investigation by the district attorney’s office found that wasn’t true: 16 of the county’s 143 polling locations had a paper shortage, and just four election judges reported a stoppage in voting.“The evidence shows that the failure to provide paper to the polling places was not a deliberate act, but rather a catastrophic oversight,” the district attorney’s report said, noting it was overlooked “amid the flurry of activities involved in the newly hired parties managing the election”.The review offered a thorough, public audit of what went wrong in 2022 and how to fix it. That kind of transparency will be required to rebuild trust, said Morrell, the elections consultant. “You address the mistake, you don’t brush it under the rug. You be transparent about why it happened and then ‘What can we do to ensure it doesn’t happen again?’” she said.Crocamo, the county manager, said there was little doubt the issues the county has faced have had to do with turnover.“We had individuals who worked in the bureau who were very good, very competent, but who were being abused. They were being verbally abused by board members. Some government representatives. People in the public coming to meetings. Some of them were receiving threats,” she said. “If there were individuals who worked in the bureau and had institutional memory and they were gone, that was gone as well. All that was gone.”This year, she’s determined not to have the same issues happen again. The county brought in a lawyer with expertise in elections to officially record its election procedures. Crocamo published a calendar of what needs to be done each week and expects an explanation if a deadline isn’t met. And the county is doing extensive outreach for poll workers at high schools and senior centers.The new election director, Eryn Harvey, 28, has experience in the office – she left in 2022 to run for elected office, but returned.During an interview in mid-November, Crocamo was especially optimistic. Luzerne county had just pulled off largely successful municipal elections – a hugely complicated endeavor because of the wide variations in local races that can appear on a ballot.“I mean, I’m not gonna convince everybody. That’s impossible. There are people out there who want us to fail. But I think we can convince most of the people, most of the voting public, that they can have trust in our elections in Luzerne county,” she said.She took a long pause. “Absolutely believe it.” More