In a normal election year, Lycoming County’s Voter Services Department oversees voting at 81 precincts and the 500-plus poll workers who man those sites. This year, however, was not a normal year for the department and its director, Forrest Lehman.

In addition to conducting a municipal election, the department dealt with a hand recount of the results of the presidential election three years ago while simultaneously dealing with orders from the Department of Justice to either make polling places ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) accessible or find alternatives that are.

Leading up to the vote on the hand recount, Lehman and his department were denigrated, disparaged and practically demonized because of conspiracy theories that have lingered from the 2020 presidential election and it isn’t over yet as litigation is still pending that seeks to question the accuracy of the voting system even as we head into 2024’s presidential election.

Once they knew that the hand recount was a go, Lehman and his staff spent hours formulating a plan for counting the two races.

“I didn’t formally track it, but I recall spending a lot of time in December and January, putting together the logistics of what a hand recount of 60,000 ballots would look like. And since it had never been done before in the state, we had to basically come up with our own paradigm,” Lehman said.

“There were some states that had attempted something similar but it took them a very long time to do it. We were fortunate in that we were not trying to count the entire ballot, we were focusing only on two contests,” he said.

After every election, 2% of the ballots cast are always counted as part of the standard post election audit procedures, but because they had decided on hand recounting all the ballots for only two contests, documents had to be adapted to facilitate that.

“We had to ramp that up to hand count all the ballots. So that required really looking at the paperwork to see if it would stand up to that kind of project,” Lehman said.

Then it was a matter of getting together enough people to do the count. Lehman had nothing but praise for the county employees who stepped up to do the count.

“One of the great things about Lycoming County is that the philosophy among all the county departments and employees is that we’re all in this together to serve the public interest. And so when people compliment Voter Services for running elections, it’s not just us, it’s a compliment of the whole county,” Lehman said.

“When the call goes out that hey, there’s a big project or there’s something bigger going on than just this one office, everybody pitches in, whether that’s an election or it could be Little League or even regrettable events like a flood or some other emergency. The county departments and offices will pitch in their people, their time, their resources to it for as long as it takes until the job gets done. And that is what we were fortunate to see happen,” he said.

Although he doesn’t get into the details of exactly how many man hours it took to carry out the recount or how much it cost in terms of those man hours, he does admit it took a lot of work to pull it together. But, things went smoothly, even Lehman’s baby daughter who was due to be born about that time, waited until the recount was done.

“It did take up almost an entire week and I was kind of walking on eggshells the whole time because my wife was about a week out from having our baby so I’m just thinking, you know, can you please just keep it in for long enough that we can get done,” he said.

“Then I had to come back and describe what all the numbers meant They basically meant our voting system was accurate — as I knew all along and said to people all along — but I had to come back I think a week or two later right after our daughter had been born to just to do that one presentation and then I went back out on paternity leave,” Lehman shared.

So, in a normal year, that would mean that the problem was solved, all parties were happy that the recount gave a true picture of the election, but again, this was not a normal year.

An important part of the recount was establishing guidelines for the protection and safeguarding of the physical integrity of the voting records because, according to Lehman, there is still active litigation almost four years later. Two of them are records requests, and the other is an expansive request to a court for a forensic audit.

“Let’s be clear about what the original allegation was, because I think one of the problems with that group is that they will try to change the story after the fact when you prove them wrong. The original allegation is that our electronic voting system was inaccurate, that there were thousands of votes that went uncounted or were under-counted for their candidate. And when we conducted that hand recount of the presidential election, we proved that claim was false. We proved that the voting system was accurate, that the votes were counted accurately,” Lehman said.

“That was the claim that they made and that claim was false. I don’t know if they have ever admitted that or walked that claim back to their own people — admitted that was incorrect, but we certainly proved it when we conducted that recount,” Lehman said.

Through exhaustive meetings prior to the Board of Elections deciding on the hand recount, Lehman had explained how the voting system worked, countered every argument with PowerPoint presentations, but mistrust of the system still lingers.

“I recall I was asked by those people at one of those public Board of Elections meetings and the phrasing of the question stuck with me because they asked, ‘Why do you have so much faith in the accuracy of the voting system?’ It’s not faith. I don’t have faith in the accuracy of the voting system. I have a belief in the accuracy of that voting system that was supported, that was justified, by years of evidence. Of us conducting pre-election logic and accuracy testing of every single piece of equipment before every single election. Thousands of test ballots, cast votes that all came through perfectly before every election and then justified on the back end of every election by all the post election audits we do counting 2% of the ballots cast in each election, and more recently the risk limiting audits in which we’ve participated,” Lehman explained.

“So I have a justified belief in the accuracy of our voting system. That has been borne out by our pre-election testing and our post-election audits for years, culminating in that hand count that also absolutely supported it. And all of the statewide recounts we’ve participated in before. That’s what my belief is based on. I have yet to see the evidence on the other side to justify the continued distrust, that continued doubt, that continued misinformation and disinformation about the accuracy of the equipment,” he stated.

Lycoming County Commissioner Rick Mirabito commended Lehman and his team from the county on the way the recount was conducted.

“I think that there’s no question that they were extremely efficient and they did a great job at doing a recount,” Mirabito said.

“Having said that, the whole question of whether we should have done a recount is sort of, I guess, water under the bridge. But I think that once Forrest was given the directive to go ahead and do the recount, he marshaled his office and also some other county employees who participated in the effort to do it in a very efficient and cost effective manner, and I think that as constituents we ought to say thanks to Forrest for his leadership in that regard,” Mirabito said.

He cautioned that people who are critical of Voter Services have to understand that Lehman and his department follow procedures that are determined by federal, state and local ordinances and laws.

“I think Forrest and his department have been recognized at the state level for their knowledge and their expertise. Forrest has testified and spoken before Senate and House Committees on election issues. They ask him to speak because they respect his experience and his knowledge of the law and his ability to combine experience and knowledge of the law to conduct elections in the most efficient, expeditious and fair way possible,” Mirabito said.

“He takes his job very seriously. He’s not a nine to five person you know, it’s not unusual to get a call from him after hours or for him to take a call after hours or on weekends from commissioners. And that shows the commitment he has to making sure that we uphold the highest standards with regard to conducting elections,” Mirabito added.

Another issue that the county is dealing with in relation to elections is finding polling sites that are accessible for all voters. The directive came from the Department of Justice that the county must comply following an inspection by the DOJ.

So far around seven polling places have been changed in order to comply with the DOJ order.

“The process is in the very early stages of starting over again with the other 50 or so sites, having to go out and look at those. We’re just starting on those and that could take another 12 to 18 months. It’s a long process,” Lehman said.

“We made some changes in a number of precincts and I expect we will need to make some additional changes next year. Not out of any specific knowledge at this point. But just knowing that we’re looking at 50 places, just based on what we experienced so far, I expect that there will be some cases where we will need to make additional changes,” he said.

With the 2020 presidential election still not put to bed for some, how does Lehman see next year’s presidential election shaping up, not from a political perspective but from a logistical view.

“We know the turnout will be greater. It drives high application volume. We know there will be days where we’ll have 50 people lined up down the hallway wanting to get mail ballots over the counter,” he said.

At least, hopefully, the 2024 election won’t be as challenging as the 2020 election which was conducted in the middle of a pandemic. Act. 77, which was passed in 2019, expanded mail ballot voting in Pennsylvania.

“Nobody expected Act 77. It came on us right at the end of 2019 and changed the entire dynamic. There was a lot to adapt to in 2020, however going into 2024, the counties have been living with Act 77 for four years and we’ve been adjusting to it,” he said.

Other challenges could come in the aftermath of the election, Lehman said,

“If you ask election directors in this state and in other states, they will tell you that 2020 never stopped. We’ve been living with it every day since then, in present tense. And that’s really, I think, going to be the dynamic for the foreseeable future in this country,” he said.

One thing Lehman has been very open about is his history as an Eagle Scout, which is something he said, that you don’t just do once and then put away — it’s forever. It’s informed how he lives his life.

“It was something I brought up at one of the first public Board of Elections’ meetings that we had. I was attempting to try to explain to some of the folks in the audience that I’m not some six-headed alien — I’m not part of a plot,” Lehman said.

“I take very seriously trying to make the community a better place wherever I am,” he added.

Before coming to Voter Services, Lehman taught at a college for 10 years.

“Nothing I’ve been doing in my life has been for the money. I want to do something where I feel like by being there, I’m making a difference and it was the same as when we were in Boy Scouts. We would go camping and after we were done camping, you would form a line and walk back and forth across the campsite picking up all the trash whether it was your or not, to leave every campsite better than when we found it,” he explained.

“That always had profound meaning for me because I took that lesson everywhere I’ve gone. I want to leave every campsite, every community, better than I found it,” he said.