Two years after the 2020 election appeared to be won, a county in Pennsylvania will recount ballots in the presidential and state auditor elections in response to public demands.
Wednesday, Penn Live reported that the Lycoming County Board of Elections decided 2-1 in October to conduct a manual count of votes to verify the accuracy of the computer tabulations. This recount will take place in the coming weeks.
According to the report, about 5,000 Lycoming County citizens petitioned the board to take this step.
While former President Donald Trump won the county by roughly 25,000 votes against Joe Biden, several members of the conservative Patriots organization are demanding a recount to see whether the vote was accurate and free of fraud.
According to the official figures posted on the Department of State’s website, Biden won Pennsylvania by an overwhelming margin of 80,555 votes.
The manual count will include every one of the sixty thousand paper ballots cast in Lycoming County. On January 9, they will be tallied by up to forty county employees, according to Penn Live.
Scott Metzger, a board commissioner who voted for the recount, stated that “no more personnel will be employed” to process votes.
Richard Mirobito, the sole Democrat on the board, voiced his disappointment with the decision.
“It just perpetuates a myth about the 2020 election. No one has complained about this year’s election,” Mirabito said.
Unfortunately for Mirobito, his contemporaries and the county elections director, Forrest Lehman, disagree with this evaluation.
Despite his skepticism, Lehman is eager to see the hand count through after so many Lycoming residents made their thoughts heard.
“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,” he told The Epoch Times.
“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.
According to The Epoch Times, Lycoming has 70,000 registered voters and a population of over 120,000, making the 5,000 petitioners a significant portion of the constituency.
“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.
He stated why just the presidential and state auditor races will be the subject of the recount.
“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,” he said. “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.”
On Election Day, the 600,00 paper votes that would be tallied were fed through scanning machines.
Lehman expressed confidence that the recount would restore public faith in elections.
“We have to get back to people being able to accept the outcomes of elections … even if your side loses. You can’t just love democracy when you win,” he said.