A recount of the 2020 presidential race conducted last week in a Pennsylvania county did not find any major discrepancies from the original results.

Lycoming County employees spent nearly three days hand-counting more than 59,000 ballots after more than a year’s worth of pressure from local elections skeptics resulted in the county commissioners voting along party lines to recount the 2020 presidential and state auditor general’s race.

The recount was completed more quickly than expected. After counting from 8:30 a.m. to roughly 5 p.m. on Monday and Tuesday, the ballots remaining Wednesday were counted in less than two hours, an overall average pace of 55.5 ballots per minute.

Lycoming County elections director Forrest Lehman hardly left the room, as he was eager to complete the process before his wife was scheduled to give birth this week.

Lycoming’s original results, tabulated by machines, showed 59,397 votes cast in the presidential contest, with 41,462 going to former President Donald Trump and 16,971 going to President Joe Biden. The hand recount resulted in a total of 59,374 votes in the presidential race, with Trump receiving 7 fewer votes and Biden receiving 15 fewer votes compared with the original tally.

In the auditor general’s race, the original tally was 58,627 votes cast, though the hand recount only found 58,615. Republican Auditor General Tim DeFoor’s winning vote total dropped by 10, and Democratic challenger Nina Ahmad’s total increased by 11.

Lehman said the county is still reviewing the hand count and plans to have a more expansive version of the report explaining the small changes later this month.

How was the recount performed?

Roughly 20 employees, working in teams of one reader and one recorder, counted 183 batches of ballots which had been organized by type: in-person, mail, and provisional.

The count was performed on an empty office floor in a county building in Williamsport. Three rows of white folding tables were set up, and workers spaced themselves at least one table apart.

Except for the low hum of the building’s heating unit and the sound of workers turning ballots and reading the votes, the room was mostly quiet.

Lehman sat at a table at one end of the room near a storage closet with the batches of ballots. Workers came to his table to sign batches in and out, and ask questions.

Human error impacts accuracy of process

Lehman repeatedly cautioned before and during the hand count that results would be less accurate due to the potential for human error, something that does not exist when ballots are counted by machine.

Many of the issues he highlighted were on display throughout the week.

The total number of ballots counted in roughly 18 batches this week did not match the previously recorded result, so with extra time at their disposal, workers counted those batches again. In all but five or six cases, Lehman said, employees discovered that mismatches were due to human error in the recount process - not the original count from poll workers on election night.

For example, a worker counting a batch from Jersey Shore, a borough in the county, originally counted three or four fewer ballots in the batch, although poll workers on election night had reported 363 ballots. A recount of the batch also showed 363 ballots.

Lehman said that these mismatches, known as “ballot inventory errors,” are generally due to poll workers writing the wrong numbers down on their inventory sheets on election night.

Will the results change any opinions?

Lehman noted that the goal of the exercise was not 100% accuracy, what he would be seeking if these were being used as the official results. Rather, it was to prove the accuracy of the machine tabulation system.

Karen DiSalvo - a volunteer with Audit the Vote PA, an election conspiracy group - agreed in a statement before the count that this was the goal, as did Don Peters, chair of the county GOP committee, in an interview on the first day of the count.

“Our interest with this is in ensuring voters, not just our voters but all Lycoming voters, that this portion of the system functions,” he said. “I think there’s this idea that we want to find some issues. We don’t.”