The assertion that “a lie is halfway around the world before truth can get its boots on” never has been truer than now, the age of pervasive, instantaneous communications. But the added problem now, largely because of misuse of that technology, is that lies don’t stop running even when truth finally catches up with them.

So it was that two out of three Lycoming County commissioners recently buckled under pressure from people still pressing the lie that the 2020 presidential election in Pennsylvania somehow was tainted. More than two years after that election, and more than two after an array of state and federal courts resoundingly rejected spurious fraud claims about the election, the commissioners rolled over and decided to waste taxpayers’ money by ordering a hand recount of the county’s 2020 general election ballots.

So 20 county election workers spent nearly three days hand-counting more than 59,000 ballots. Sure enough, the process revealed mistakes — not in the original election tabulation that was performed by ballot-counting machines, but by the humans conducting the recount.

The machine count recorded 59,397 votes, 41,462 for Donald Trump and 16,971 for Joe Biden. The hand recount recorded 23 fewer total votes, 15 fewer votes for Biden and seven fewer for Trump. The Biden and Trump votes don’t add up to 23, part of broader human error in the hand recount.

County elections director Forrest Lehman repeatedly had warned that the hand recount would not be as accurate as the original machine count. He devised a meticulous recount method to account for recount mistakes.

The mistakes are not a criticism of the election workers, who can’t help it that they are humans. One counting team, for example, turned in a tall sheet with 41 tally marks but mistakenly recorded 44 votes on the “total” line.

Lehman, who consistently has pushed back against election deniers and conspiracy theorists, put it this way to Spotlight PA: “The machines don’t get tired, get distracted.”

In the end, the exercise further proved the integrity of the election system. The only question now is if that truth can keep up with the big lie’s sprint.

— The Citizens’ Voice, Wilkes-Barre via TNS