An agenda item at last week’s Lycoming County Commissioners’ meeting sparked a debate online concerning the location of the headquarters of the company which supplies the voting machines for the county’s elections, the Clear Ballot Group, Inc.

Forrest Lehman, director of elections, addressed those voters’ concerns at this week’s commissioners meeting.

“I’ve been asked to come up here and provide some information, because I understand there are some public comments on the video regarding the county’s voting system and the company that manufactures it, Clear Ballot,” Lehman said.

“The questions seem to be around where the corporate offices are located,” he added.

Although he admitted that he did not have a corporate organization chart detailing where all the corporate offices for Clear Ballot are located, he said that he has always dealt with offices in New England.

“They have offices in New Hampshire and in Boston. I mean, Boston, Massachusetts. I mean, that’s the tinderbox of the American Revolution, right? What’s more American than that, except maybe right here in Lycoming County, of course,” he said.

“The person I’ve dealt with at Clear Ballot has always been fantastic. I’ve had the same person point of contact for seven years. He’s a retired Army Ranger. He does a fantastic job,” Lehman said.

While he agrees that people can question where the company is incorporated, he feels the more important question is “does the system work?”

“Because, you know, what equalizes the playing field for any company that wants to sell a voting system is that you can headquarter yourself anywhere you want. You still have to show that the system works. And every voting system that somebody wants to sell to a state, a county, whatever it has to go through an extensive testing and certification process,” he said.

“None of these questions that are being asked touch on that, or, you know, talk about the importance of that,” he said.

He explained that the systems have to go through a federal testing and certification process, and they have to go through a state level process before any jurisdiction is able to buy that system and use it.

“Even after that, we have to test every single piece of equipment that’s going to go out and be used in an election. And we do that before every election,” Lehman said.

He indicated with the Primary Election coming up in May, his office had just finished testing the equipment earlier in the week.

“I think we’re up to something like over the seven years we’ve owned this voting system, we’ve put 50 or 60,000 test ballots through that system, the content of which we know in advance. And every single time, the numbers come out absolutely. That 50 or 60,000 test ballots we put through the system up to this point, that’s more votes than we have in most elections here in the county, and that’s just to test it,” he said.

“And then even after the election, we do post election audits, where we select random batches and count them up again and make sure the system did its work correctly, and that’s always come out correct too, including, I would add hand recounting all 60,000 ballots cast in the November 2020, presidential election. And those numbers were the same. You know, the differences were a handful of votes out of 60,000 so we’re talking about thousands of a percent that came down to human judgment on a few individual ballots,” he said.

“The question about where the company’s offices are located, I think, is besides the point. What really matters is, does the system work? And you know, in our county, and every county in the state that uses a voting system, no matter what company it is, we have years and years of receipts to show that it does,” he added.

If the online comments at the end of the meeting were illustrative of the debate about where Clear Ballot is headquartered…it isn’t over.