'We’re not done': Pro-Trump group exasperates PA officials after new 2020 ballot hand count finds no fraud

Telling the New York Times, "You close one election-denying door, they’ll open a window,” the top election official in rural Lycoming County, Pa. expressed dismay that an expensive hand count of all the ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election still failed to satisfy the election deniers looking for evidence of fraud.

As the Times reports, last week -- over two years after President Joe Biden beat incumbent Donald Trump for the presidency -- 28 employees of Lycoming County went through every 2020 ballot and, after an "estimated 560 work hours," revealed that the former president actually received seven fewer votes than were reported earlier.

Nonetheless, a lawyer for the conspiracy-minded Audit the Vote PA, claimed they will press on with attempting to uncover election fraud in a statement claiming, "This is just one piece of the puzzle. We’re not done.”

That has left Forrest Lehman, the county director of elections who oversaw the count, at his wit's end.

As the Times' Trip Gabriel wrote, "The results of Lycoming County’s hand recount — like earlier recounts of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona — revealed no evidence of fraud," before adding, "The former president, who easily carried deep-red Lycoming County in 2020, carried it once again with 69.98 percent of the vote — gaining one one-hundredth of a point in the recount."

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According to the Times report, Lehman is resigned to the fact that the election deniers will continue to challenge the results.

"It’s surreal to be talking about 2020 in the present tense, over two years down the road,” he lamented with Scott L. Metzger, a Republican member of the county commission that approved the expenditure of funds for the recount adding, "As far as I’m concerned, I’m done with it.”

That hasn't stopped Jeffrey J. Stroehmann, a former chair of the former president's 2020 campaign in Pennsylvania, from ramping up new attacks on the election totals.

"Our goal from Day 1 when we approached the commissioners, we said our goal here is not to find fraud — if we find it, we’ll fix it — we just want to restore voter confidence,” Strehmann explained with the report noting he has called for an investigation of Lehman claiming he is "part of the steal.”

With the report adding, "Election deniers have no plans to stand down. They have requested reams of documents that they believe will expose fraud once and for all," Lehman told the Times, "We’ve received a series of crazy records requests. You can quote me. They are insane.”

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