Lycoming County Commissioners in Pennsylvania have taken the unprecedented step of agreeing to conduct an official recount for their 2020 election results after weeks of citizen enquiries and a petition signed by 5,000 people.
Motivated folks from all throughout the state are taking action and requesting recounts of the votes from the 2016 election in their respective counties. These activists have been working hard to guarantee that every vote is accurately counted while cooperating to ensure a fair process!
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“In our county, they approached our commissioners and leveled allegations that there were thousands of uncounted votes in our county based on what I believe are nonsense statistics,” Lycoming County Director of Elections Forrest Lehman said.
Hundreds of residents from all around the county gathered in groups of 20 to 80 people and did so fervently. Their objective? can request a recount after being dissatisfied with their local government’s responses to inquiries concerning election results. An astonishing demonstration of protest strength, this worldwide uproar eventually collected almost 5,000 signatures and pushed officials to act accordingly!
“That’s when county commissioners decided, as the board of elections, that if there are 5,000 people who signed this petition and have this belief, then we need to hand count these ballots in order to restore public trust in the outcomes of our elections,” Lehman said.
The commissioners found 5,000 signatures particularly astounding because the county only had 70,000 registered voters out of its 120,000 residents, which was like turning one bushel of grain into five!
“This is not something we want to do after every election, but we need to do it once, at least, in order to prove once and for all that our voting system counts the votes accurately and that there were not thousands of uncounted votes that were hidden by an algorithm or some other nonsense like that,” Lehman said.
Hand Count
Although Lycoming County may appear to be stuck in the past when it comes to voting, they have adopted a remarkably modern system. On paper ballots, voters fill in ovals that are fed into scanning machines where they are photographed and counted. All data is stored digitally with amazing USB devices located within each precinct for quick storage, while the original physical records are kept secure.
An complex mechanism is put into place at the conclusion of election day to make sure votes are counted and results are calculated. In order to deliver data that will be dumped into a single machine, precincts from all across the county travel with their USB devices in hand. Then, this information travels upward through state channels until it reaches the Department of State, where the final vote totals are calculated!
Unfortunately, the recount’s result won’t turn out as anticipated.
40 county employees in Pennsylvania have been given the unusual responsibility of confirming the outcomes of two 2020 elections: the contest for United States President and the contest for Auditor. There are around 60,000 ballots that must be manually counted. Although it’s a difficult task that calls for unfathomable amounts of attention, these committed people are up to the challenge!
“We chose the auditor general as the second contest for two reasons,” Lehman said. “It is on the front of the ballot along with president, so that’ll eliminate the need to flip every ballot over. The other reason we picked auditor general is because that was a statewide contest that was won by a Republican. Because obviously the presidential contest was won by a Democrat.”
The county is looking into how voting for candidates from other parties might affect elections and how this could affect the results of each election.
“There has been an inability to believe that voters might have split their tickets. That they might have voted for a Democratic president, but then they turned around and voted for a Republican for other offices,” Lehman said. “There’s been an inability to believe that people might do those things. Whereas, I absolutely know that people do those things because I see the ballots.”
Although the recount is under progress, he thinks the outcomes might differ from what was previously stated.
“We don’t expect that any recount of that many ballots is going to match one-to-one with the voting system,” Lehman said. “We expected that there will be human errors committed during that hand count.” But they also don’t expect to be off by the thousands, he said.
In November, the Department of State advised counties to think about keeping ballots after the 2021 election in case there were any lasting repercussions from the 2020 election process. The Lycoming County Commissioners have made it apparent that they intend to keep these records on file until 2023, or a full two years after the election.
Beginning on January 9th, the formal election recount will begin. It may take a week or more for all ballots to be verified. Every vote counts in this crucial election that will have an impact for years to come!
“We have to get back to people being able to accept the outcomes of elections,” Lehman said. “Even if your side loses. You can’t just love democracy when you win.”
The first time the votes in Douglas County, Nebraska using optical scanners the votes were also hand counted by a counting board at the polling places except for the delegates to the Republican National Convention in 1976. I know this because I was on the counting board for the Nebraska Primary Election in May of 1976. I do not remember reading or hearing about any differences in the hand count verses the optical scanners. There must not have been a significant difference between the two. I also know that sometimes there split party votes in elections. In Nebraska’s Second Congressional District Republican Don Bacon won his 2020 re-election bid and Joe Biden won the district vote and one of Nebraska’s Electoral College five votes. There was a similar outcome in 2008 with Obama winning in this district and Republican Lee Terry winning the Congressional election.