Based on your description, something like this might be a good start. It assumes you can run a pipeline command that feeds the list of file names to the perl script's STDIN - e.g. using a bash shell with standard GNU/linux utils, a command line like this:

cd {top_level_directory_where_all_files_are_located}

find * -type f | search_script.pl > hit_list.txt
[download]

And "search_script.pl" would be something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

while (<STDIN>) {
    chomp;
    next unless -f();
    my $text = do {
        if ( open( my $fh, $_ )) {
            local $/;
            <$fh>;
        }
        else {
            warn "Unable to read $_\n";
        }
    };
    if ( $text =~ /\s(recommend\S*\s+to\s+vote\s+\S+)/ ) {
        ( my $hit = $1 ) =~ s/\s+/ /g;
        print "$_: $hit\n";
    }
    else {
        print "$_: NO_MATCH\n";
    }
}
[download]

Note that in bash you can redirect STDERR as well:

find * -type f | search_script.pl > hit_list.txt 2> search.errlog
[download]

The output to STDOUT will tell you which files have the sought-for text, and what the text was. It also lists the files that failed to match, so you can take a closer look at those, and tweak the regex as needed.

The regex proposed above will match all the inflections on "recommend" (-ed, -ing, -s, -ation), and will capture the matched phrase only up to the word that follows "vote". (You can extend the capture to include more words before and/or after, if you like, by adding more \s+\S+\s+ elements inside the parens.)

When there's a match, all kinds of white-space between words is allowed, and it's all normalized to a single space before output, to ensure one line of output per file.

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