Down River

By John Lipez

Lyco Wacko II:
The results are in and, surprise, surprise, those 2020 Lycoming County election recount results are basically unchanged.

The good news is twofold: 1) Lycoming County government staffers were able to carry out the tedious task during their regular working hours so as not to place an extra financial burden on Lycoming County taxpayers on this recount folly and 2) more importantly, the results should only reaffirm the public’s faith in our electoral process.

In case you missed, multiple Lycoming County staffers spent multiple hours (an estimated 560) doing a hand recount of nearly 60,000 votes cast in the November 2020 election. They did so after some 5,000 election deniers demanded the recount, based on their petitions claiming there was the likelihood of “rampant fraud” in the 2020 voting in the county on the other side of Pine Creek.

The recount showed there was no fraud, just as earlier 2020 recounts in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin found no fraud. In fact, the hand tally actually increased the margin of victory within the county for Donald Trump; he gained eight votes while Joe Biden had 15 fewer votes. That improved Trump’s percentage triumph, 69.98 percent of the vote, by one one-hundredth of a point.

The New York Times picked up on the Lycoming recount matter and did a feature story a few days back. It said Forrest Lehman, Lycoming Director of Elections, had opposed the recount, as The Times put it, a needless bonfire of time, money and common sense.

Lehman told the paper, “It’s surreal to be talking about 2020 in the present tense, over two years down the road.” He attributed the relatively few discrepancies picked up by the hand count to human error in reading ambiguous marks on the paper ballots.

But Lyco election deniers are not giving up just yet. Karen DiSalvo, an attorney involved in the recount push, said “This is just one piece of the puzzle. We’re not done.”

Observers from both political parties watched the recount but Ms. DiSalvo has raised questions about the process, including that Lehman (a former Eagle Scout, for goodness’ sake) oversaw the totaling of the recount votes. She told The Times, “We asked to see the tally sheets before the processing and were denied” and claimed that Lehman had a “vested interest in making sure the numbers aligned.” Along those lines, she is part of the group filing a right-to-know request for the tally sheets.

Lehman closed with, “We need to get back to a place where we can process the outcomes of elections in a constructive, healthy way.” That’s how it’s done on this side of Pine Creek, here in Clinton County. Hopefully the rational voters in Lycoming County will see the recount results from there vindicate their faith in the system and maybe those results will convince some of the election deniers to see that their effort was in fact folly. But short term, I doubt it.

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Great Quotes of Our Time:
Did you catch the recent quote from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell where he said the central bank shouldn’t be involved in setting climate policy? The Fed he said instead should “stick to our knitting” and not look for possible social benefits as it sets policy

It’s been a while since hearing that knitting reference, the last came some decades ago from the late Penn State football coach Joe Paterno who occasionally used the phrase “tend to our knitting.” That’s not the kind of quote you’d likely hear from current Nittany Lion coach James Franklin. But Joe was old school and grew up in an Italian family in Brooklyn and one would guess that quote came from his mother.

And here are a couple Penn State-related quotes, these from Eli Manning when he made a late summer visit to the PSU football program to film a feature disguised as a Penn State football quarterback walk-on candidate, calling himself Chad Powers:

“Think fast; run fast” and “My mom’s my coach. She’s not very smart. But she’s a good coach.