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By mid-afternoon Monday, the hand recount of two races in the 2020 general election had progressed quickly through the mail-in and provisional ballots and moved on to in-person ballots, with a goal of finishing the count of all votes by the end of the week.
Everything seemed to be going smoothly on the first day of the recount, which was requested by a group of concerned citizens who claimed that they wanted to assure the integrity of the election where former President Donald Trump won the county but lost the election.
Races being recounted are the presidential and the auditor general.
"They're moving about how I expected. In order to complete this project in a week, we needed to get through the mail ballots and the provisional ballots the first day because they represent about a quarter of the votes cast in the election," said Forrest Lehman, director of Voter Services.
"The fact we got through those means we're on track to be able to do it in a week," he added.
The Board of Elections was approached last year by a group of voters who questioned why, with the imbalance of Republican voters versus Democrat voters, Trump did not win by a greater margin in the county. They also questioned the security of the voting machines, arguing that they could be easily hacked.
Following months of discussion, the Board of Elections voted to do a hand recount of the two races in the election.
County employees who had been tapped to do the recount began filtering in early in the day. Pairing off, they began flipping through the ballots, with one person reading the candidate's name chosen and the other person putting a hatch mark on a tally sheet. When the count on the sheet reached 50, a new sheet had to be used. As the count for each precinct was finished, the sheets were taken to Lehman where the numbers were recorded and justified with the official count done following the election.
At one point, Lehman acknowledged that one ballot count in a precinct had been off by five. The counters were then told to check their work, which resulted in the count of the number of ballots matching. It was noted that at no time were the people counting the votes aware of what the actual official vote count was.
"We are encountering exactly the kinds of variations you would expect in any recount. The fact that this is a hand count doesn't really mean anything one way or another except you're adding human error into the mix on top of what you would normally have with a machine recount, which is you may have some ballot inventory changes, you may have some variation in how it counts very close ambiguous ballots," said Lehman.
"Different human beings are going to look at those differently and reach different conclusions. On top of that, you're going to have some human errors in there, where maybe they miss a ballot card or something like that," he said.
At the end of the week, when all the counting is done, Lehman stressed that he doesn't feel that the counts will be off by the thousands that had been alleged by those pushing for the recount.
"I anticipate there will be variations in vote totals when all is said and done. I anticipate the final count of ballot cards cast in the election will be different from what the official results were when all is said and done, and that is because it's a recount. The fact that it's a hand count instead of a machine recount will inject human error into the equation," Lehman said.
"However, the people who have attacked this county's elections, who have attacked our voting systems, have alleged that our vote totals were off by thousands -- that will not happen. So, when that does not happen, they will have to come up with a different argument," he said.
"I anticipate that this recount will demonstrate beyond any shadow of any doubt that our electronic voting system is accurate and that the variations will not be large," he said.
"It will not be anywhere near thousands. I don't plan to let them forget that," he added.
Observers from the county's political party committees were present as well as representatives from the media.
"My personal goal was to convey to the public that the system was working," said Donald Peters, chairman of the county's Republican Committee.
By using electronics, such as voting machines, to tabulate the vote, there is alway the potential for a system to be hacked, Peters said.
For Morgan Allyn, former chairperson of the Democratic Committee who was at the recount as an observer, the process was just "a waste of taxpayers' funds."
Characterizing the 2020 election as heated, Allyn still feels that Lycoming County did a "very good job of managing" it.