A close congressional race being decided by the House of Representatives could come down to a small number of disputed ballots.
Iowa Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks was declared the winner and initially seated in Congress, but Democratic opponent Rita Hart claims in her election contest that 22 ballots must be part of the final tally. Yet, an Iowa GOP attorney says this tactic shows it was Miller-Meeks who unfairly lost ballots during the recount.
Last November, Miller-Meeks defeated Hart by just six votes out of more than 394,000 cast after 24 counties in the district conducted their own recounts of the ballots and she was certified the winner by the Iowa Canvassing Board. Hart, however, contested the election to the House as opposed to going to an Iowa appeals court to challenge the decision, arguing that 22 ballots were “erroneously” excluded from the final tally.
“These 22 ballots include (i) curbside and absentee ballots that election officials accepted for counting but mistakenly omitted from the initial count and (ii) valid absentee and provisional ballots that election officials erroneously rejected,” Hart said in the 176-page document.
In the petition, Hart says of the 22 ballots, 18 were cast in her favor and three were cast in support of Miller-Meeks. This would give the Iowa Democrat a nine-vote lead.
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Hart’s petition also claims the recount failed to “comply with Iowa law and the U.S. Constitution. Each county, led by a three person ‘recount board’ conducted its own recount. Some county recount boards, in violation of Iowa law, failed to conduct a hand review of ballots that were recognized as ‘overvotes’ or write-in ballots by machines. Some county recount boards reviewed ‘undervotes’ for voter intent while others did not. Some county boards reviewed and disqualified ballots for containing ‘identifiable marks’ while others did not. And some counties even engaged in different types of review for different precincts.”
An overvote is when multiple selections are marked for one contest. An undervote is the result of an unclear marking. Neither is counted.
An attorney familiar with the recount matter told the Washington Examiner that the majority of the 22 ballots the Hart campaign is focused on were kept out of the final tally for legitimate reasons.
“The 22 ballots are all ballots that for one reason or another were not included in the final certified results. Most were rejected because the absentee ballot envelope wasn’t sealed properly, or they didn’t arrive on time. There was one where the affidavit on the envelope wasn’t signed,” the attorney said. “What happened in the recount is the recount boards can only look at ballots that were actually in the Election Day total. They’re simply looking at what was the actual tally of ballots.”
Disputes over recount methods occurred when the tens of thousands of absentee ballots needed to be counted and the final tally in Scott County was questioned. The total number of absentee ballots cast in the race was 64,052, which the auditor treated as one precinct, as opposed to going through each ballot and physically finding the precinct it came from.
“So, when the recount board started looking at those ballots, they did something that we objected to strenuously at the time,” the attorney said. “What the recount board voted to do, 2 to 1 with our person objecting, was to do what we call the ‘hybrid method,’ where they told the voting machine to separate out any ballots that were overvotes, write-ins, or had a stray mark on the ballot.”
Undervotes, however, were never separated from the bunch, and the machine would tally everything else, but the rest would be eyed by the hand-count method.
Iowa election law allows for precincts to tabulate ballots by either machine, which is relatively fast, or by hand, a slower process that allows officials to determine voter intent.
The Miller-Meeks campaign argued the Hart campaign pushed an “illegal” hybrid method that combined both counting methods during a single tally, while Hart’s campaign claimed that if recount boards did not combine machine and hand methods during one tally, ballots holding eligible votes would not be identified through a machine recount.
The final count of the 64,000-plus ballots left the recount board in Scott County with an extra unexplained 131 ballots cast. Both candidates garnered more votes, but Hart netted 26 more ballots in Scott County than Miller-Meeks.
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“The Rita Hart campaign was perfectly content to walk out of Scott County with a number from that recount which is not accurate because it was in their advantage … but here’s the irony we picked up four votes from the recount of the Election Day ballots. You can pencil this out that, if you toss out the absentee precinct, you know, it’s a net,” the attorney argued. “It would swing 34 votes in Scott County. It would make this a 40-vote margin and it makes these 22 ballots irrelevant.”
Scott County Auditor Roxanna Moritz told the Quad City Times that one possible reason to explain the discrepancy is that absentee ballots that were to be sent through a different tabulation machine on Election Day, after another tabulator broke down, were mistakenly put in a bin of previously counted absentee ballots.
