House Administration Committee members convened briefly Friday afternoon to start establishing procedures in contested election cases filed under the Federal Contested Election Act.
The committee is reviewing two contested elections: Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District and Illinois’s 14th Congressional District.
Iowa Democrat Rita Hart lost to Republican Rep. Marianette Miller-Meeks by six votes out of more than 394,000 ballots that were cast.
Miller-Meeks was certified the winner of the election following a recount and a recanvass of the district’s 24 counties, but Hart, who decided against going to court, instead contested the election to the House of Representatives.
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In Hart’s filing to the committee, she alleges that 22 ballots were excluded from the final tally, which, if included, would have favored her to win the election.
Miller-Meeks, who was seated on Jan. 4, filed a motion to dismiss the case, saying precedent forces the House to reject the contest because Hart never originally appealed to a state court.
House Administration Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, told the Washington Examiner last month that Miller-Meeks could be removed from office should the contest Hart mounts show that she earned more votes, but ranking member Rodney Davis, an Illinois Republican, sees a problem with removing a member who was already sworn in and seated.
“Rita Hart had an opportunity to challenge each of these claims using Iowa’s impartial judicial proceedings, but instead, she has chosen to sidestep Iowa law and ask this House to decide this election for Iowa voters. Taking up this election contest would set a dangerous precedent that candidates don’t have to exhaust their legal options through the state and can, instead, go straight to Congress if they don’t like the outcome of an election,” Davis said at Friday’s meeting “I can’t think of a worst first step this committee could take in a new Congress than to waste taxpayer dollars by moving forward with overturning this election.”
In Illinois’s 14th Congressional District, Republican Jim Oberweis, who was defeated by two-term Democratic Rep. Lauren Underwood by more than 5,300 votes, also contested the election to the House.
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Underwood, who flipped the district in 2018, was the first woman and minority to win the seat, once held by former Speaker Dennis Hastert. The Illinois Democrat filed a motion to the committee to dismiss Oberweis’s case.
