Susan Brown
It’s always important to keep in mind your reference for measuring voltage. Voltage is always a difference in charge between two points. In this case, you should have 120v from L1 to N, and L2 to N if the circuit were functioning normally.
(In this scenario, the N is a point used as a reference for these two voltage measurements. There is no neutral line, since this is an L1-L2 circuit.)
What would you expect the reading across the element (L1 wrt L2) to be in this circuit?