Pennsylvania County Completes Hand Recount of 2020 Presidential Election

Electoral workers began processing ballots at Northampton County Courthouse in Easton, Penn., on Nov. 3, 2020. Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images

A hand recount of 2020 election ballots in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania this week yielded only slight variations in the final numbers.

In Lycoming, former President Donald Trump still beats President Joe Biden, with the new totals: Trump at 41,455 with seven voters fewer than the 2020 count, and Biden at 16,956 with 15 voters fewer than the original count.

“The results confirm that the electronic voting system produces consistently accurate results; they confirm that the outcome of the presidential election in Lycoming County was correct; and they confirm that the vote totals were not inaccurate by thousands of votes as was claimed,” a press release from the Lycoming County Board of Elections said.

Of the nearly 60,000 paper ballots recounted across seven candidates, the county was off by 35 votes, compared to the 2020 results. This is what Lycoming County Director of Elections Forrest Lehman predicted before the recount.

“We don’t expect that any recount of that many ballots is going to match one-to-one with the voting system,” Lehman told The Epoch Times in December. “We expect that there will be human errors committed during that hand count.”

The county dedicated 31 total staff to the task, with 28 counting. While they thought the counting could go on for the rest of the month, it only took three days from Jan. 9–11.

Public Request

After the 2020 election, citizens started attending the county commissioners’ meetings with questions about the results. Some were convinced that there were thousands of uncounted votes.

Ultimately, citizens brought in a petition with 5,000 signatures, asking for a recount. Lycoming County has about 70,000 registered voters and a population of around 120,000. Commissioners granted the request.

The Board of Elections will host a meeting to review the outcome of the hand recount in finer detail on Jan. 24 at 10 a.m. in the Commissioners’ Board Room, 330 Pine Street in Williamsport.

Results

The county hand-counted results of the presidential and the auditor general races. This way they could see if there was a glaring difference between races. Also, the auditor general race was on the front of the ballot along with the presidential, saving time by eliminating the need to flip every ballot over. Here is what they found:

“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 in December.