It is done.

Over two years after the 2020 presidential election, the final batch of ballots were counted again, this time by hand, early Wednesday afternoon.

There were 59,481 ballots within the official results from the election that were counted, according to Forrest Lehman, director of Voter Services.

“That’s how many we knew going into this that we needed to look at. We have one batch still out that is being hopefully finalized right now,” Lehman said, speaking in the nearly empty room that since Monday had been the site where about 24 people paired off and meticulously tabulating votes for the presidential and auditor general races in an election that was conducted in 2020.

“It took a little over two days to get through the batches once, and then the additional time was spent today, Wednesday, (going) back through some of the batches a second time because the first time that they were looked at; we had some number discrepancies…,” Lehman said.

“We kind of held onto those and then decided we were going to go back and look at them again at the end. So, that’s what we did,” he added.

In some cases, Lehman said, there was a valid inventory discrepancy, so that’s what the result is.

“In many other cases, there was no ballot inventory discrepancy — it was just human error. So they recounted all those ballots again, and that became the result,” he said.

The hand recount had been requested by a group of county voters who questioned the results of the 2020 election, particularly the number of votes cast for

President Donald Trump, which they argued were less than they anticipated, even though he won in Lycoming County.

So, did counting by hand add the element of accuracy those who petitioned for it sought?

According to Lehman, not so much.

“One of the things I learned at least as a result of this is that I don’t believe the hand count added any value to the process. If anything, it injected additional human error,” he said.

“That’s just because you have a lot of people doing work that is normally done by machines,” he said.

“I know that the people out there who requested this don’t trust the machines, but when we release the results, it’s going to show that they’re very close and that the variations that we will have discovered would have been discoverable much more quickly, much more easily by a regular machine recount,” he said.

Even though the recount ended in about two and a half days, much less than the five days expected and definitely less than the Jan. 9 through 31 timeframe set aside if needed, it still took much longer than a machine recount would.

“When we do a regular machine recount, if you put those 500 ballots or 1,000 ballots from a batch, through the central scanner and you see a discrepancy, you can immediately dive into that because you can scan them three times in 30 minutes and know there definitely are 1,001 ballots instead of 1,000 because you can scan them over and over that quickly,” Lehman explained.

“Instead, what we were having to do is hand those 1,000 ballots out to a pair of people and say, hand flip through one at a time and let us know how many there are. We had a couple cases where people would get burned out on that, and we had to give it to someone else because they were driving themselves crazy,” he said.

“They just need to take a step back and have somebody do it with fresh eyes. Machines don’t get tired like that. They don’t get distracted like that,” Lehman said.

Going into the recount, Lehman had warned that human error could be a part of the process.

“When you do a hand count, it can be hard to separate what are the genuine discrepancies or changes in vote totals versus what are the changes that are just due to human error. How do you separate those? It’s really, really hard to do, if not impossible,” he said.

Results from the hand recount will take much longer to be released than the results that come on election night or within a few days following a machine count of votes.

“We don’t have them right now because they are just written down on paper,” he said.

“We had some folks asking us why don’t you have them — they were the same folks that asked for the recount,” he said.

“It’s like, you want a hand count, but that means the results are analog; they’re not in a system where I can just run a report, so you can’t have it both ways,” he said. “If they want a hand count, it’s going to take a lot more time to put it into results.”

Lehman anticipates sending out a media release within the next day or two to state what the results were compared to the original official certified results from 2020 and what were the net changes in vote totals for the two races.

After that initial announcement, there would be a board of elections meeting where there would be more time to present more detail to the public, Lehman said.

The cost of conducting the hand recount has also been a point of contention in board of elections discussions.

By the end of the week, according to Matthew McDermott, the county’s director of administration, there should be data available from department heads to show what the employees who performed the recount had to do above and beyond their normal workload to support doing it.

He added that, during an emergency scenario, it is not uncommon to pull county employees from their normal work to help.

“It’s not uncommon. This isn’t something over-the-top brand-new,” McDermott said.

Lehman also attributed the staff that helped with the efficiency and speed with which it was completed.

“We were able to get some great people to come in and help and they learned very quickly what they were doing, how to do it and get that done for those two contests. They’re the reason why things went very smoothly and turned out as well as it could be under the circumstances,” he said.

Although he has not spoken with any of the people who had requested the recount as the process draws to an end, Lehman offered his opinion on what it has shown.

“To me, it confirms what I knew all along. Somebody asked me once, why do you have faith in the voting system? It’s not faith,” he said. “It’s a belief based on evidence that, in fact, we test this equipment before every election. We do audits after every election. When we’ve done statewide recounts those numbers stay close. They stay accurate.”

“So, going into this, there was no universe in which vote totals were going to change by thousands that they’ve been alleging all along. It simply was not going to happen,” he said.

For the election deniers, who claim the electronic voting systems that are certified in the state are inaccurate or are open to being hacked, Lehman offered a rebuttal.

“They produce consistent, accurate results. They work. They are tested before elections; their performance is audited after elections. Every county has years of accumulated evidence that those systems count votes accurately,” he said.

“We have statewide recounts. We have it before and after the elections and we have it here from a hand count where those numbers are hardly going to change. At that point, I don’t know what’s left to argue,” he said.