IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) –
Democrat Rita Hart asks the U.S. House to investigate and quash the race Iowa claims to have lost by six votes, arguing that 22 ballots were falsely excluded and others were not investigated during the recount.
In a contest notice Released Tuesday, Hart claims she would have scored 15 votes and defeated Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks had the 22 ballots added up in Iowa’s 2nd congressional district.
Hart asks the Democratic-led House to count those votes and perform a uniform recount in the district’s 24 counties, saying she is confident she will be ahead of the game after that trial and have the winner exclaimed.
“While it is admittedly tempting to close the curtain on the 2020 election cycle, ending this contest prematurely would deprive Iowa voters of the right to vote and grant congressional seat to the candidate who received fewer legal votes,” Hart attorney wrote. Marc Elias in the 176-page notice. including affidavits from several voters saying their Heart votes were falsely rejected.
The campaign gave The Associated Press the notice and announced the filing Tuesday morning.
The Iowa recruiting board declared Miller-Meeks the winner by 196,964 against 196,958, the closest race in Congress since 1984. Her win would narrow the Democratic House majority, which is currently 222-211 with two un-called races.
The certification followed a recount in which Hart nearly obliterated Miller-Meeks’s 47-vote lead after the initial investigation. The leadership had previously been tossed back and forth between the candidates after the discovery and correction of two major tabulation errors.
Hart announced earlier this month that she would not be challenging the outcome before the courts of Iowa, which said state law required a match to be decided within days and that there was not enough time to examine thousands of ballots.
Instead, she is filing her appeal under a 1969 law called the Federal Contested Elections Act, which will launch an investigation by the House Administration Committee that could take months. To be victorious, Hart must prove through a preponderance of evidence that she received the most votes.
Republicans have responded with outrage to Hart’s maneuver, saying she is bypassing a review by Iowa judges while trying to get her fellow Democrats to declare her a winner.
But Hart and her supporters have argued that every legal vote should be counted in a race this close.
“It is critical for me to make sure that this two-pronged assessment by the US House is fair,” she said. “Iowans deserve to know that the candidate who has received the most votes is sitting.”
According to a 2010 report from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, the House reviewed 107 contested elections between 1933 and 2009 and placed the candidate that the state declared the winner in the vast majority of cases.
The report says the House declared the challenger the winner in at least three cases, most recently after a race in Indiana in 1984 in which majority Democrats overturned the state’s outcome, ruling that incumbent Democrat Frank McCloskey won by four votes.
During the trial, candidates can make affidavits and sue witnesses. The committee can confiscate ballots and voting records and do not have to follow state law about which votes are counted, which could be crucial in Hart’s challenge.
In her filing, Hart notes that 11 ballots were not counted due to polling errors, including nine ballots discovered during the Marion County recount and two ballots that were not put in a Scott County tabulation machine.
Election officials agree that these were valid votes. But under Iowa law, they could not be taken into account during the recount because they were not included in the original investigation. Hart would have gotten seven votes, Miller-Meeks three.
In addition, Hart outlines 11 other ballots that she says were falsely barred for various reasons from voters who tried to support her.
These included absentee ballots that were rejected because return envelopes were not properly sealed or were resealed with tape after arriving in the sealed mail. An envelope is torn; another was drawn but not in the right place. Two of those voters say they were falsely convinced their votes would count.
Johnson County apologized to another voter whose preliminary vote was barred after an election official’s mistake. Two other ballots were not counted after they were left in a dropbox outside of the Cedar Rapids district, where voters attend school. All signed statements stating they voted for Hart.
Hart also states that the recount did not comply with Iowa law and the constitution because each county used a different method: machine, hand, or a mix.
Ninety-seven ballots marked by machines as outvoted – meaning the voter selected more than one candidate – were not hand-graded for intent during the recount, the filing said. An expert hired by Hart’s campaign estimated that, based on a 40% inclusion rate in counties that surveyed the votes by hand, intent could likely be set for dozens of them.
In addition, more than 5,400 ballots marked by machines as undervotes where the voter had not chosen a candidate were not assessed during the recount, nor were there hundreds of vote-in votes, Hart says.