MARK NANCE/Sun-Gazette Executive Plaza.

Petitions are circulating calling for an audit of the 2020 Lycoming County election results, County Commissioner Tony Mussare announced at the commissioners’ weekly meeting.

“Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been in a number of places where there’s a petition being passed to audit the Lycoming County voting,” Mussare said during the commissioners’ comments portion of the meeting.

“This is something that is not going to go away and it is something that we can probably handle. I’m not sure that we’ll ever satisfy everyone…there are voters out there that have lost confidence in our system, and it’s understandable. I totally agree with them,” Mussare said.

Although he does not believe that there was fraud in the county’s election, Mussare added that there were a lot of names on the petitions called for the audit.

“They are our constituents and we’re going to have to listen,” he said.

The ballots from the election are secured and Mussare said that perhaps a sample of them could be audited.

“We run a sample of the ballots and hire somebody to come in as long as we’re there for both parties to count some of those ballots and compare them to the data off the scanners. Just to satisfy that everything does match up without losing the integrity of the machine,” he said.

“I believe we should reconcile the ballots to the counts. It’s going to take some time, but I think we need to do this,” he added.

It was brought up by Commissioner Rick Mirabito that there had been a challenge to the election results which was filed in the Middle District Court.

“I haven’t looked at it in detail, but certainly the Federal Court looked at it in detail. I don’t know what they did in terms of auditing…but I think we want to make sure that we are not trying to reinvent the wheel,” Mirabito said.

“The federal judge, I think, determined that there were no violations, but we want to talk to our solicitor. We sit as the election board so certainly we would have to have a discussion as the election board as to whether we want to do it,” Mirabito added.

Following the election, the county did audit the election results and according to Mussare the state came in and did another audit.

“If you saw the data they had, we answered most of their questions, but then there were some others where it was about registrations, and it’s absolutely compelling,” he said.

“It was the largest election that this country has ever seen. The largest, and yet, it’s the most questioned,” Mussare added.

One of the issues with people who question the election results, according to Mirabito, refers to the vote count for the top of the ticket, which were votes for the president.

“They were concerned that President Trump lost re-election, but what’s a real challenge is the fact that he got fewer votes than Senator Yaw, Representative Hamm, Representative Wheeland…” Mirabito said.

“I think that’s part of the reason that there’s a discrepancy. At a certain point I understand people are concerned and they’re signing a petition, but at a certain point that is a compelling statement about what happened, right,” Mirabito suggested.

He also reminded the other commissioners that the Voter Services Department is in the middle of preparing for the upcoming Primary Election.

“That’s a conversation for the Election Board,” said Commissioner Scott Metzger.

Officials from the county’s Voter Services Department could not be reached for comment.