The local elections team just recently conducted a recount of the 2020 presidential election results in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, amid public pressure and after approval of their effort by a GOP majority on the just three-member county commission — and to the surprise of nobody who’s up to date on the evidence, zero systematic fraud was uncovered.
Trump originally won the county in the 2020 election, and he also prevailed in the recount, in which both he and Biden lost a small number — around a dozen or less — votes apiece. The discrepancy is nowhere near the level that would change the outcome of the election and is attributable to human error, rather than some kind of nonexistent conspiracy or corruption in the equipment originally used for tabulating the county’s 2020 votes. (The recount was by hand.)
As reported in The New York Times, some of the far-right activists operating locally who were involved in the pressure campaign preceding the recount have now expressly indicated following the results that they will continue to probe the 2020 elections — and now the recount process as well. Forrest Lehman, an elections official in the county, told the publication of what he called “insane” public records requests from these individuals. That list includes every application for a mail-in ballot ahead of the 2020 election — although that doesn’t mean local extremists will be getting voters’ personal information, details of which will instead be redacted. Yet, they also want copies of every single ballot cast on Election Day back in 2020.
One of those involved in the push for the recount was Jeffrey J. Stroehmann, who helped lead Trump’s 2020 campaign in the county and insisted that he and those in his rhetorical corner “just want to restore voter confidence” — which might sound nice but definitely isn’t accomplished through pushing for investigations that would cover rhetorical ground already copiously examined by probe after probe, as though there’s been a sudden influx of evidence that there hasn’t. Lehman was frustrated. “You close one election-denying door, they’ll open a window,” he observed.
Stroehmann alleged in an online broadcast that Lehman is supposedly “playing for the other team” and “as liberal as the day is long.” With Trump obviously remaining furiously committed to his false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, this stuff isn’t going away any time soon. Despite already losing in court, and no matter that Democrat Katie Hobbs is already in office as Arizona governor, Kari Lake — the pro-Trump Republican who ran for governor in that state last year — is still pushing back in court, and Trump himself has pushed for getting back in office before the 2024 election even takes place, something for which there’s obviously zero legal — or reality-based — foundation to move forward on. There have been some significant updates in holding these people accountable, including with the recent announcement by Michigan state Attorney General Dana Nessel she was reopening her investigation into individuals in her state who falsely signed on as purported electoral college members for Trump despite Biden’s win there back in 2020.
