Pennsylvania county to recount 2020 election results

Pennsylvania's Lycoming County will conduct a recount of its 2020 presidential election results amid mounting pressure from residents on officials to provide transparency on their handling of the contest.

The county commissioners made the decision following the submission of a 5,000-name petition demanding the recount, according to the Epoch Times. The county has approximately 70,000 registered voters and the petition's size was a motivating factor in securing the recount, officials told the outlet.

"That’s when county commissioners decided, as the board of elections, that if there are 5,000 people who signed this petition and have this belief, then we need to hand count these ballots in order to restore public trust in the outcomes of our elections," Lycoming County Director of Elections Forrest Lehman told the outlet.

"This is not something we want to do after every election, but we need to do it once, at least, in order to prove once and for all that our voting system counts the votes accurately and that there were not thousands of uncounted votes that were hidden by an algorithm or some other nonsense like that," he went on.

While the county uses voting machines to tabulate the final results of its elections, officials will tabulate the roughly 60,000 paper ballots submitted in the contest by hand. They will also recount the results of the state auditor race.

"We chose the auditor general as the second contest for two reasons,” Lehman told the Times. "It is on the front of the ballot along with president, so that’ll eliminate the need to flip every ballot over. The other reason we picked auditor general is because that was a statewide contest that was won by a Republican. Because obviously the presidential contest was won by a Democrat."

The recount is slated to begin Jan. 9. Lehman expressed hope that the recount will help to restore trust in the county's elections and assure voters that the contest was fair.

Pennsylvania, a pivotal battleground state, has been one of the focal points for proponents of former President Donald Trump's claims that mass voter fraud affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential contest.