Overworked, underpaid, under attack: on the frontlines in a US election office

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.