Election workers perform a recount of ballots from the recent primary election at the Montour County administration center in Danville, Pa., Friday, May 27, 2022. (AP FILE Photo/Matt Rourke)

The hand recount of the 2020 General Election may be over, but for the group that had fought for the recount, questions and speculation about the results of the 2020 election are not.

“We’re going to look at the findings and digest everything. This, certainly from our aspect, is not the end of it,” said Jeffrey Stroehmann, one of the people who had petitioned the county’s board of elections for the recount.

“There are a lot of other pieces of the puzzle that we’re trying to fit together to get an overall answer as to what was different about this election than the ones before,” he said.

What Stroehmann describes as a small group of county residents not aligned with the Lycoming County Patriots or Audit the Vote had asked the board of elections to conduct a hand recount of the 2020 presidential election in order to investigate what they called “anomalies” surrounding the ballots. Following months of discussions, the board voted 2-1 along party lines with the lone Democrat, commissioner Rick Mirabito, voting no, to conduct the hand recount.

The recount of votes for the presidential and auditor general races was completed earlier this week, which many felt would bring closure to the issue. But

according to Stroehmann’s comments, there has been no period put on this story.

The group targets mail-in ballots, federal ballots and overseas mail in process as the next piece of the puzzle they want examined.

“Captain Keshel’s statistics we are finding are kind of pushed over to be revealed in the mail-in ballots’ side. They’re very disproportionate by traditional voting trends,” Stroehmann said.

The Keshel whom Stroehmann referred to is a former Army Intelligence officer who has lectured on his research on theories surrounding the 2020 election. Keshel had spoken to a local group last year.

“So we want to look at those as well. But we were able to obtain those through (a) Freedom of Information Act request; therefore, we don’t need county resources to do the recount,” Stroehmann continued.

“In fact, I personally recounted every single one of those mail-in ballots, and we’re still arriving at the final tabulation. But we’re gonna be able to tell how accurate they were to what was reported,” he said.

Stroehmann was among three county Republicans who has joined a lawsuit to obtain the clear vote cast record. Although the judge ruled in their favor, he issued a stay to allow the county time to appeal. According to Stroehmann, the appeal date for that is Tuesday.

“So hopefully, the State Department and the commissioners don’t appeal (and) we’ll be able to see those clear voting records and get an idea of those tallies,” he said.

Clear vote cast records, or CVRs, are spreadsheets which contain raw data for ballots, but no identifiable information about the voter.

“We’re just seeking to understand it better to help reassure the voters of Lycoming County that their vote counted. You know, we’ve been steered in a lot of different directions. A lot of things were thrown out there, but from day one we always said that our small group — I’m not talking about Lycoming County, county patriots or anybody else — has always been working just to help reassure, because we are hearing a lot of people,” Stroehmann said.

“It’s just that the question is out there,” he said. “And I’m a community guy. We’re all community people. And we just want to reassure voters that Lycoming County has got it. We’re not necessarily looking for fraud, we’d be even happier if we found out that everything was in order and we could explain that anomaly that Captain Keshel found and we are seeing. We just don’t understand it yet.”

When asked if former President Donald Trump won in Lycoming County, and what more his group hopes to accomplish, Stroehmann replied, “There were things that happened in this last election that I don’t understand, and a lot of people don’t understand. So we’re all trying to find the answer.”

The results from the 2020 election, when compared to voter registration trends and elections by traditional voting means, were not typical, according to Stroehmann.

“That changed this time,” he said.

“The Republicans out-registered with the Democrats, several fold. That’s a trend that by all the traditional election campaign methods creates a certain result. And that’s what Keshel sees in his analysis: It didn’t work this time. It was completely upside-down. So what we’re trying to do is find out why that happened,” he said.

“I think what we’re starting to understand is, it’s not so much about a campaign,” Stroehmann said. “They call it the ground game. The ground game used to take place on election day between both parties, Democrats did their ground game, Republicans did theirs. The object was to get as many voters out as quickly as possible. In Lycoming County, the Democrats always done a good job on the ground. They’ve got cars, they’ve got people, they go people up and take them to the polls, but you only have so many volunteers, and so much time.”

“What I personally found now through the pick process of investigating this is the ground game now has changed to early voting and the ground game now has more time to be able to do more with fewer people. Perhaps that could be why this trend has reversed. We just want to understand, we want to be able to report accurately back to the residents of Lycoming County and clear all of this, all this static out there. So if this recount comes back, and everybody’s happy, we’re happy too. That piece of the puzzle is now pushed over in the corner,” he said.

One issue that has continually been emphasized by Stroehmann and his cohorts is what they feel is the lack of transparency by elections officials. Some are now challenging the idea that Forrest Lehman, director of Voter Services, should be the one tabulating the results of the hand recount.

Karen DiSalvo, an attorney who represents the group of Republican conservatives, questions Lehman doing the compiling without oversight, according to a report from PennLive.

She claims he has a vested interest in having the recount totals align with the 2020 results, PennLive reported.

Citing the need for transparency, PennLive stated that DiSalvo said she has filed a right-to-know request to see the tally sheets.

Stroehmann agreed with DiSalvo.

“What’s frustrating to us is every time we go to request information, to see the CVRs, to view the ballots, the Department of State keeps saying no, you’re not. In any situation when you put a wall up like that against you trying to find information, it’s suspicious,” he said.

“I would have liked to see a little more transparency. In our ability to review the tally sheets from the hand count we’ve done a Freedom of Information Act request to see them. So we’ll go ahead and verify them ourselves,” he said.