Forgive my bias; I believe that Forrest Lehman is one of the sharpest, if not THE sharpest, county official we have. As Department of Voter Services Director for Lycoming County for the past seven years, his knowledge and understanding of voting laws is encyclopedic. Yet, thankfully, Forrest can dummy it down so that someone like me can comprehend the difficulties and challenges that his office faces in light of the mercurial practices of the Pennsylvania legislature imposed over voting laws in our state.

We sat down to discuss the upcoming election in May and what the public should expect. Director Lehman first noted that the Office of Voter Services has been on a roller coaster for the past couple of years. In fact, he admitted that the landscape is almost unrecognizable from what it looked like when he started in his position in 2013.

Evidence of the unbearable stress placed on those serving in his position can be found in the fact that 22 out of 67 counties in Pennsylvania, that is ONE-THIRD, have seen their Voter Services Department directors quit or retire in 2020. And the hemorrhage is continuing as two more have already announced their retirement this year. Many of these individuals have decades of experience, but they gave up trying to keep up with the continual chaos that the Pennsylvania legislature has put upon them.

Lycoming County barely keeps its head above water. Director Lehman noted that since last fall, his staff had to be doubled with part-timers and temps to keep up with the volume of work that was imposed upon them. The normal and important safeguards to election integrity were severely loosened by the effort of Governor Wolf’s initiative signed as Act 77 in October of 2019 to make mail-in ballots less restrictive. The wind of voting freedom turned into a whirlwind of voting chaos that never seems to stop.

To give just one of many examples, Director Lehman noted that January is the slowest month in the Department of Voter Services. They do important maintenance operations such as checking equipment, reviewing work policies, etc. Yet this year, administrative requirements of Act 77 required them to not just stop all these normal January activities but hire part-timers to double their staff just to meet newly imposed deadlines. Then came February, and the Department of State ordered every county in the state to throw out ALL their pre-prepared envelopes. All of the time and effort preparing seven thousand envelopes had to be tossed in the trash. Director Lehman had to buy all new envelopes, and staff had to start over from scratch in preparing the mailing.

Not only does Forrest Lehman and his three permanent staff members have to keep twirling these plates on a stick that the Commonwealth throws at them, but they must also deal with a public that intensely distrusts them right now based largely on rumors floating around on social media and the airways.

After the November election and into December, Director Lehman related his office was bombarded with calls daily as a result of media scares. One day it was from a social media post telling people to check the Department of State’s ballot tracking page. The rumor mongers forgot to mention that the tracking was only for mail-in and not in-person voters, resulting in hundreds of panicked citizens thinking their vote had been lost. A talk-show host told people to check to see if any of their dead relatives had “voted.” Lehman’s office took fifty such calls in one day on that canard. Unbelievably, people called checking on dead relatives from decades past. Each one of the hundreds of calls that came in were checked, and not a single case of a living dead voter was found in Lycoming County.

This would be humorous if it did not take up countless hours of time that was already being eaten up by endless bureaucratic nonsense coming out of Harrisburg. And making bad news even worse, the upcoming election in May promises to be another doozy. In a normal year (remember those?), an off-year primary election would be very routine. But this year, there will be two and probably three Pennsylvania constitutional amendments on the ballot. On the local level, there are an abundance of candidates running, especially for school boards, because of parents’ frustration. And note, each and every one of these hundreds of candidates for local offices throughout the county must submit a petition with the approved number of signatures properly marked that must be reviewed by Director Lehman and his staff.

So, please, before bothering these tremendously overworked county government employees, check out the county website: lyco.org; look under “Departments” for the last link, “Voter Services.” Probably 99 percent of possible questions could be answered there. Director Lehman and his team do a great job when they are allowed to do their job. The water keeps rising, and they have to wear wader boots to keep up with the flood. If it gets any worse, we will all drown.