Lycoming County 2020 election results show little change

WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — On the 797th day following the defeat of former President Donald J. Trump, a rural Pennsylvania county on Monday began a recount of votes from Election Day 2020.

Under pressure from conspiracy theorists and election deniers, 28 Lycoming County employees counted — by hand — nearly 60,000 votes. It took three days and an estimated 560 hours of work, when ballot-counters checked the paper ballots at long rows of desks in the county elections department in Williamsport, a place once considered Little’s home. World Federation.

Lycoming County’s manual recount results — like previous recounts of the 2020 elections in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona — showed no evidence of fraud. The numbers reported more than two years ago are close to the numbers report on Thursday.

Mr. Trump finished with seven fewer votes than was recorded on the voting machine in 2020. Joseph R. Biden Jr. have less than 15 votes. Overall, Mr. Trump won 8 votes compared to his opponent. The former president, who easily won Lycoming County in bold red in 2020, won it again with 69.98 percent of the vote — winning one percentage point in the recount.

Does that quell the suspicions of election deniers, who have filed petitions alleging the possibility of “pervasive fraud” in Lycoming in 2020?

It didn’t do.

“This is just one piece of the puzzle,” said Karen DiSalvo, a lawyer who helped lead the recount campaign and a local volunteer for the far-right group Audit the Vote PA. “We’re not done yet.”

Forrest Lehman, the county elections director, oversaw the recount but opposed it as an unnecessary bonfire of time, money and common sense. He sighed in his office on Friday.

“It’s weird to talk about 2020 in the present tense, more than two years from now,” he said. He attributed the slight discrepancy between the results of the manual recount and the voting machine to human error when reading unclear markings on paper ballots.

Lycoming County’s recount is part of a disturbing trend of election distrust that has become mainstream in US politics, fueled by Mr. Trump’s lies. and his supporters. Amid the Appalachian Mountains of north-central Pennsylvania, such conspiracy theories have been firmly established.

County elections experts have spent months responding to the arguments of vote deniers in public hearings and responding to requests for their right to know the minutia. of voting records. Mr. Lehman said he doesn’t think facing the truth will change some people’s perspective.

“You close one door of refusal to vote, they open another,” he said.

One of the residents pushing for a manual recount, Jeffrey J. Stroehmann, former president of Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign in Lycoming County, said he was pleased the results matched the number of voting machines that year. 2020, although he says further questions need to be answered. to handle.

“Our goal from Day One when we approached the commissioners, we said our goal here is not to find fraud — if we do, we will fix it. — we just want to restore the confidence of voters,” said Stroehmann, founder of the far-right Lycoming Patriots group.

Mr and Mrs DiSalvo were inspired by the debunked claims of a retired Army officer named Seth Keshel, who made headlines in 2021 with his assertion that there were 8 million “excess votes”. voted for Mr. Biden. His analysis was lay off via professor at Harvard, the University of Georgia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A petition circulated by Ms. DiSalvo and Mr. Stroehmann notes that the number of registered Republicans in Lycoming County has increased compared with Democrats from 2016 to 2020, but Mr. Biden won more votes than Hillary Clinton. Election deniers find this suspicious.

“If Republicans WIN voters and Democrats LOSE voters – why did Biden get 30% MORE votes in the November 2020 election than Hillary Clinton in 2016?” their requirements require.

Mr. Lehman called this argument nonsense. Party registration does not determine how a person will vote, he said. Mr. Biden outperformed Clinton in most Pennsylvania counties in the 2020 election. Mr. Trump also raised his total vote in the county to 16%.

“Voter unpredictability — it makes democracy dignified and messy,” Mr. Lehman told county commissioners at a hearing last year. The committee ultimately approved a two-to-one, partisan recount.

Election officials at all levels have been harassed and vilified since 2020, when election masterminds like Trump blamed the officials and helped inspire the “Stop Behavior” movement. steal”. During an election conspiracy program broadcast online on Rumble, Mr Stroehmann called for an investigation into Mr Lehman, who he said was “part of the theft”.

“Our director of voter services is playing for another team,” Mr. Stroehmann said on the show. “He’s as liberal as the day.”

Richard Mirabito, the Democrat Lycoming County commissioner, said there was no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Lehman. “He was most appreciated for his integrity,” he said. “Those kinds of claims undermine people’s trust in our system.”

Mr. Mirabito voted against the recount but was rejected by two Republicans on the panel. Scott L. Metzger, a Republican and chair of the county committee, also endorsed Mr. Lehman. He has done an excellent job, he said.

Following the 2022 midterm elections, recount requirements in Pennsylvania elections were not near flooded counties, delaying the certification of some results. In Arizona and New Mexico, rural county commissions held last year’s primary or general election results confirmation.

Across the country, a wave of Trump-backed election conspirators ran for statewide offices with control over voting. lose their race. But some election deniers have won races at the local level, where activist pressure on officials stands a better chance of yielding results.

Mr. Metzger — one of two Republicans on the committee that approved the recount — said he voted for it after thousands of people signed the petition, and others approached him on the street. say they don’t want to vote because they don’t trust the system. Now that the tally matches what the voting machine shows in 2020 and there’s no evidence of fraud, Metzger said, it’s time to move on, said Metzger.

“For me, I’m done with that,” he said.

Before the commissioners voted to recount, Ms. DiSalvo and Mr. Stroehmann presented the results of what they called a door-to-door inspection of several county neighborhoods. The campaigning was carried out by volunteers from Audit the Vote PA, a group formed in 2021 in the false belief that Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, had won Pennsylvania.

Election campaigners claim to have found many “anomalies,” including tabulated votes from people in nursing homes who don’t remember voting, as well as people who say they voted, although there is no record of that.

Mr. Lehman said he and his staff dealt with each case. For nursing home residents, the elections office collects records showing they returned a mail-in ballot with their signature on the envelope. Voting was lacking, he said, adding that he wasn’t surprised that some people could claim to have voted in a face-to-face interview when in fact they didn’t.

Those who refuse to vote have no plans to resign. They have requested a series of documents that they believe will expose the fraud once and for all.

“We got a bunch of crazy recording requests,” Mr. Lehman said. “You can quote me. They’re crazy,” he added, referring to the requests.

Voter deniers have requested copies of every vote-by-mail application, demanding that Mr. Lehman and his staff carefully edit all personal information. They are urging copies of every ballot cast on Election Day 2020, and they went to court to seek digital data from voting machines in each of the county’s 81 constituencies. .

Although observers on both sides have been watching the recount this week, Ms. DiSalvo has raised questions about the process, including Mr. Lehman’s oversight of the counting of votes.

“We asked to see the tally sheets before final processing and were denied,” Ms. DiSalvo said, referring to the paperwork used by polling stations. The election director, she added, has “certain interest in making sure the numbers are aligned.”

Her team filed a right-to-know request for the manual tally tables.

Mr. Lehman, a former Eagle Scout and teacher, displays two iconic photographs in his office. One shows Harry S. Truman in 1948 holding up the famous erroneous headline “Dewey Beats Truman”. The other shows Lyndon Johnson being solemnly sworn in on Air Force One in 1963 after the assassination of President Kennedy.

“Both are transitions of power,” Mr. Lehman said. “One is comic, the other is tragic. We have managed to handle both as one country. I don’t know what category to put 2020 in. We need to go back to a time when we could handle the outcome of elections in a healthy and constructive way.”