It was November 2022 and Beth Gilbert was running the midterm elections in Luzerne County in Pennsylvania when the voting machines ran out of paper. Although she was only 28 years old, she had a masters degree in political management and had already served on the city council. Initially Gilbert had been hired as deputy director of the Bureau of Elections. But when she was only three months into the job, the director quit and she found herself in charge of managing the voting process. 

When the paper shortage was discovered, Gilbert dispatched teams to polling sites with fresh supplies; a local judge allowed polling stations to stay open by two extra hours to accommodate the delays. But as the news of the debacle spread, Gilbert and her colleagues received a slew of vitriolic texts, phone calls and social-media comments: 

They all need to be fired!!!!
They need to be drawn and quarter [sic] that’s what they need an example made of them not to fuck around
Failed porn star
You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig