Christopher Ullery
@ulleryatintell
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Philly Data Hub Reporter for the USA Today Network in PA, general data nerd, existential dread enthusiast
Bucks County, Pennsylvania
Joined December 2015
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ICYMI: New documents obtained by the
@USATODAY
network in PA show how a religious liberty law firm introduced an athletics policy restricting trans athletes days after a school district hired them to review library policy regulations.
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Outside of Central Bucks High School East where teachers are gathering to protest the passage of Policy 321, a policy teachers say restricts discussions on LGBTQ and other issues
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Schillinger played an instrumental role in a PAC that probably changed how school board races are funded forever. She is now facing misdemeanor charges for assault and providing alcohol to minors. Here's the story from me and
@BethMRodgers
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The story should follow shortly. The band is the Ocean Avenue Stompers, by the way. Fingers crossed
@BucksCountyGovt
hires them to play in the ballot deliveries in November. Can you imagine the Project Veritas video that would come out of that?
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Leaked library policy administrative regulations in Central Bucks suggested an outside group edited a draft made by the district's library coordinator. When I asked about this, the district sent out a mass email confirming the group's involvement.
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In about 12 hours, three stories will go live by
@BethMRodgers
and I based on a review of what we found when we searched "transgender" in school district policies across the state. You can read those tomorrow morning, but for now I wanted to explain how we did it. 1/11
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After a nearly two-hour preliminary hearing today, a district judge found that charges against Clarice Schillinger for assault, harassment and providing alcohol to minors can move forward to the Court of Common Pleas.
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Well, this has blown up. While I have you all here, please check out my favorite story of 2020:
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In a 6-3 vote, the library policy, trans athlete policy and the “neutrality” policy in central bucks have been tabled. They will be discussed at a possible future policy committee meeting.
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@StephanieWein
Petition of support for more ballot drop boxes in Bucks County for the November election. Why, isn’t this how you deliver all of your correspondence?
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So, did you ever learn something that leaves you feeling uncomfortable, but you don't really know what to do with it? Let's talk about web scraping, feminine hygiene products and school policy for a minute: A 🧵
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So, we went through three voter exports between Nov 2020 to Dec 2021 to see if PA's voter rolls were full of obvious errors that might suggest a forensic investigation is necessary. 1
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When I first saw these petitions filed on the county's prothonotary case search, my first thought was to contact
@BethMRodgers
because it reminded me of something we worked on last year. Rodger's story in next part of 🧵
About 45 Republican voters in Central Bucks regions 1, 2 and 3 are asking the county courts to issue a hand recount of the Nov. 7 election results.
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Just in time for
#BannedBooksWeek
,
@willcarless
@aliaemily
and I delved into BookLooks, a content rating website with ties to Moms for Liberty and a vital tool in a movement to ban books in public libraries. Check it out! Now, a 🧵 on how we did it 1/20
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Library policies like ones passed in
#BucksCounty
could be upended by a House Bill from
@RepFriel
by standardizing the book challenge process and protecting books from being pulled over controversy rather than content.
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The committee also has a standing monthly calendar event for titled "Oath Keepers" and has pledged a partnership with the Berks County Patriots. We began watching hours of meeting videos the group posted to Rumble and that showed a much larger plan for 2023 elections 4/8
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AND DEMS SWEEP CENTRAL BUCKS IN 2023!
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We saw a campaign to remove several books from Central Bucks libraries begin in earnest this week. The link below is my story on this week’s meeting, but there’s something else I wanted to expand on: the Miller test. 1/20
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The plan for now is to flood school board, municipal and county races up for election this year but ultimately the coalition seeks to reshape the Republican Party and repeal mail-in voting within the next four years. 6/8
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Over 600 titles are featured on , a website containing content guides for school libraries based on book reports from “concerned parents” across the country. I touched on a bit of the data in this essay, but I've got more now. 1/16
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So, it's official. I'll be leaving the
@CourierTimes
newsroom to be the USA Today Network of PA's Extremism and Social Justice Reporter later this month. I'm really excited to be joining
@BruceSiwy
and
@BethMRodgers
and the rest of the team!
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Keith Willard, a Holicong Middle School teacher and advisor to the schools Gay Straight Alliance leads the walkout at about 3 this afternoon
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I'm pretty happy with how these stories turned out, but I'm more excited for what comes next. We've already found some interesting things and I can't wait to move ahead. 11/11
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A very long line has already formed and parking has gone to overflow outside the Central Bucks meeting room ahead of Dec 4 reorganization meeting tonight.
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Central Bucks superintendent resigns, current school board could approve a roughly $600K severance at tomorrow night's meeting.
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Here's the uncomfortable part: while this policy recommends that you use tampons or pads to act as a field medic, but you're gonna have to bring those supplies from home because they don't have a policy saying the district will supply them.
Anyway, enjoy that information.
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Very quiet at CB west as we wait for this school board meeting to begin
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In Dec,
@BethMRodgers
and I began looking into a series of legal challenges filed in voting precincts across the state. With the help of
@ISDglobal
we found a handful of groups seemed to be leading an effort to challenge 2022 election results. So we kept digging. 1/8
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CBSD staff got a letter through interoffice mail asking why a union president was "trying to replace you based on your skin color and divide our community?"
Yesterday, the community asked for the resignation of the elected official who mailed it.
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Got held up with a few things (and a recount delayed this way back) but I finally got to sit and analyze the voter rolls in Bucks. For brevity's sake, the story below focused on Central Bucks and Pennridge but ...🧵
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This project first started with our work looking into how a religious liberty law firm and its parent group have been influencing school districts behind the scenes. 2/11
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Beth Darcy, former school board president, on Lucabaugh’s $600k severance: a fortune for quitting.
“His sudden resignation is clearly designed to ... avoid accountability at the higher standard he demanded from everyone else in this district.”
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So, I saw this tweet earlier today about AuditTheVotePA and some claims about voter data. There's a lot to unpack here, so let's begin. 1/27
@russ_walker
@LancasterOnline
@CarterLNP
AuditTheVotePA says they found "registration discrepancies" during their door-to-door canvass, but
@ulleryatintell
/
@CourierTimes
just reported an in-depth analysis (30M data points) of recent voter registration across PA, and found vanishingly little in the way of concern..
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It took some doing, but I was eventually able to built a pretty extensive database of BookLooks titles and book review content. Here's the story I did with Will Carless and
@aliaemily
back in early October. 6/11
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What wasn't posted publicly and what is in my story is the draft copy that was made before the family institute reviewed it. Literary merit and requiring a challenge committee to read the entire book before deciding were in that draft. Now those rules are gone.
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Emails provided via RTKL request to
@BethMRodgers
and I shed more light on the relationship between the Independence Law Center and Central Bucks as
@DemocracyFwd
provides emails showing a new link between ILC and the Central York school district. 1/6
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There's something like 117,000 different policies and administrative regulations in the roughly 440 PA school districts that use BoardDocs. You know how I know? I counted them all. Well, I counted the individual unique URL values while parsing through every BoardDocs page 9/11
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The editors thought up a better headline than what I did. Anyway, there was some online chatter about the stack of books the newly sworn in CBSD board president used to take her oath on Monday. I called her up and she explained the reason behind each one.
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In case you get the same mailer someone just messaged me about in a local tax collector race - a tax collector can't raise your local property taxes. That matters because the inverse of that is the other candidate can prevent your taxes from going up, which they can't.
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Pennsylvania school board cancels field trip to Washington, DC over city's pandemic rules via
@usatoday
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I'm gonna do a thing this week.
Join
@LWVPA
.
@PBPC
,
@VotingIsLocal
,
@pawethepeople
&
@ulleryatintell
, from
@CourierTimes
&
@TheIntellNews
, journalist who "examined millions of Pennsylvania voter records."
Register here ⬇️
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Just to help clarify because this has been a weird day. So, 45 GOP voters wanted a recount in 15 precincts which could have delayed the certification of 3 out of 5 CBSD school board seats.
Dems asked Judge to let the county do the recount. Judge says ok. Recount starts tomorrow
#Breaking
#CBSD
news.
#BucksCounty
judge grants injunction. GOP-sought recount of ballots in three regions to take place Friday. The latest.
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When I asked for an update on the library regulations last week, I was told the district didn't post them publicly. I filed an RTK to get the official version.
I already had a leaked copy that was identical to what the district sent me.
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I've updated the story to add that school board director Karen Smith, one of three members that opposed the library policy, said she was unaware of any review by the PA Family Institute before today's email.
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Also, here's a link to a thread on BookLooks if you'd like to see what we did there. Back to tomorrow's stories though ... 7/11
Just in time for
#BannedBooksWeek
,
@willcarless
@aliaemily
and I delved into BookLooks, a content rating website with ties to Moms for Liberty and a vital tool in a movement to ban books in public libraries. Check it out! Now, a 🧵 on how we did it 1/20
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I first stumbled on to them thanks to some leaked documents on Central Bucks' July 2022 library policy. After that, we started filing RTK requests in a hodgepodge of school districts where we thought ILC might be. It was a slow process. 3/11
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Berks County is just one of possibly over 100 groups that make up the PA Patriots Coalition, which announced in Nov. its "You're Fired Campaign" to oust establishment GOP officials. 5/8
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You can also read my summary of this voter registration analysis here. The main story is for subscribers only. It's nice to be paid for my work because of things like hunger and shelter.
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Oh, also, I know a lot of people like to point out there were a few hundred people with birthdates of 1/1/1800. Turns out, there's a program that keeps victims of domestic violence from having some information put out publicly. Including birthdates.
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After months of getting more familiar with web scraping, I came to realize that we could probably automate a search of school district policies. Most school districts use a website called BoardDocs to host policy books and you can search each site for specific topics. 8/11
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Somehow, for as packed as the Central Bucks meeting room is, public comment ended after maybe 45 minutes.
I’m in a state of absolute shock.
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At first, that process took about 14 days in total, reading through every policy item looking for keywords. I've since managed to cut that down to 1 to 2 hours total. These first stories are the districts that acknowledge "transgender" students or employees in some way. 10/11
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Every candidate did gain more votes, but it averaged out to be about a 0.21% average increase across all three races.
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A lot of what we found kept leading back to a GOP committee and a patriot group in Berks County. That's when
@BethMRodgers
found out the committee has been moving to the far right, including attempts to only seat America First committee members. 2/8
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Here's one of the stories
@BethMRodgers
and I did on LGBTQ inclusive policies after reviewing about 440 Pennsylvania school district policy books.
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About 20 minutes before the deadline I gave the district respond, this mass email went out confirming a few things I suspected. It also included a copy of the ARs — the thing they said they don't post publicly.
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New invoices reveal Central Bucks investigation into LGBTQ+ discrimination topped $1.4M via
@couriertimes
and
@JoCiavaglia
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There was an apparent expansion of the group's reach in Pennsylvania, but there's about 500 public school districts in PA. Going through every one is effectively impossible for a person. Thankfully, I know
@PythonPr
4/11
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Back in May, I wrote a column comparing today's push to ban books in school libraries to the comic book censorship of the 1950s. I had wanted to do a deeper analysis of BookLooks then, but I needed to learn more about web scraping. 5/11
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Libraries to locker rooms: How a religious law firm is changing PA school policies via
@couriertimes
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A complaint filed Thursday by the ACLU alleges worsening treatment of LGBTQ students in Central Bucks, and the district's failure to address it.
@JoCiavaglia
reports. What a week for a vacation.
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So, we checked around a few other counties but there didn't seem to be any other similar petitions. It seems like this is an isolated attempt to either overturn the election results in three Central Bucks races, or maybe just delay some of the new board from getting sworn in.
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How much will the Central Bucks probe into LGBTQ discrimination cost taxpayers? We know now. via
@couriertimes
@JoCiavaglia
reports
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Central Bucks school board to vote tomorrow night on $90,000 raise for Superintendent Abram Lucabaugh. The raise to $315,000 could make him one of the highest paid Supers. in PA with potential raises totalling ~$46K over the next five years.
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Something really important in a report today from
@JoCiavaglia
about an internal review of five books under Central Bucks' new library policy.
"The district ... does not consider an internal review as the same as an external book challenge."
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Central Bucks is starting to look pretty blue right now. Region 2 has two Plumstead precincts out that could give Hunter the boost she needs to stay on the board. Still combing through some numbers though
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This week, I wanted to do something a little different for a data round up. I wanted to know how often current voters have cast a ballot in a municipal election. I'm calling this my "muni voter participation" list and you can see the top 50 here. But...🧵
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Two years ago I went through some claims made by a group called Judicial Watch, which claimed "more voters than people" in 19 counties. When we ran their numbers, it just didn't add up.
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The point is that judging whether or not a book is obscene means reading the entire book and not an excerpt — something Woke PA and similar groups seem to avoid (possibly out of necessity). 7/20
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Municipal election .... I mean, it's not going to matter because they clearly state elsewhere that they are filing this for the Nov. 7 Municipal Election. It's just ... come on man.
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Oddly enough, one of the strategies members of the coalition are suggesting is to get Republicans to vote by mail in greater numbers. 7/8
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On vacation, but let's take a quit look at voter numbers. We're less than 37 days until the midterm elections in Pennsylvania, and it looks like new voter registrations are really ramping up. 1/11
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We don't need private information like driver's license or social security numbers to do a rough analysis to identify possible problems in the voter rolls. That info can help confirm suspicions, but this feels like a solution without a problem.
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It just really seems like there's better ways for the legislature to spend its time and taxpayer dollars. One way, off the top of my head, give counties more time to prepare mail ballots to be counted prior to election day. A thing ... 20/23
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So far, it looks like the three outgoing Republicans board members are not here. Seated are Dr Mahmud, Lisa Scicsio and Debra Cannon.
All of the incoming members appear to be present
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I went looking for duplicate voters, missing data fields, participation in past elections and a lot more. If you add up every potential problem in the most recent export, you would have a list representing less than 0.1% of the commonwealth's voter rolls 2
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The student press table at the North Penn High School mock Democratic Convention. There’s an auditorium of passionate young adults talking immigration, opioids and health care. This is probably the most impressive school event I’ve ever seen.
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Also, one of the books challenged is Gender Queer, which has this one page that gets shared around a lot to show that it's too shocking for teenagers.
I thought maybe we should also share another page from that book. One that cuts more to the heart of why merit matters — pg. 239
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I guess we'll start with a story from
@pegquann
that's going to publish in about 6 hours. There's a new program in
@Pennsbury_SD
to provide tampons and pads to students for free. It's an good story you should check out in the morning. This is isn't the uncomfortable part, btw.
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Pending an appeal or some unforeseen legal challenge, Central Bucks will go from a nine-region district to a three region district to elect its nine-member board in 2025. This story includes a region map w/precincts and an election schedule. But ...🧵 1/12
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I mention in the story, but I also wanted to reiterate here that these filings are incredibly similar to the filings made in the past, so much so that they are seeking a hand recount. That's actually part of what lead the last recount push to fall through.
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Election Day is here in Bucks County, where approximately 475,195 voters (as of Nov. 1 voter export) will get to cast a ballot for municipal, school and county races! I'll be helping with the live updates tonight through the early morning.
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I also found fewer than 20 people who appeared as duplicates across multiple voter exports. If the duplicates get removed over time, then that suggests regular maintenance to me. One expert I talked to said a red flag for duplicates is warranted but not when it's >1%
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Some Republican activists who have backed claims that voting by mail is corrupt are now advising GOP committees to embrace the ballot option in coming elections. Here's the story
@BethMRodgers
and I published this week. 1/17
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The reason I say that is because it seems like if I wanted a book challenged but didn't want to formally make a complaint, I could just read a passage of a book without context at a public meeting. Sounds familiar
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Pulling on that thread actually led us to learning more about the PA Patriots Coalition and their overall goal to reform the Republican Party into a more America First Party through local election victories. They already had one success in Berks last year
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You can read more about the changing Berks committee and the You're Fired campaign in these two stories. 8/8
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I can't easily check every policy book for all of the 500 school districts ... but I can go through a lot of them. In fact,
@BethMRodgers
and I recently published a couple of stories about an apparent lack of affirming LGBTQ policies in PA schools.
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It would be so easy for a student newspaper to play it safe, write up a cute and quick story about whatever kids do (behold the ravages of age!) and call it a day. Instead, these students did the news, and they did it pretty damn well. 9/9
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You might recall a similar push for precinct-level recounts after the 2022 election. They were effectively boilerplate recount challenges filed in multiple counties across the state. At a local level, you can just request a recount if you have $50.
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