The Republican candidate in Iowa's still-too-close-to-call 2nd congressional district says the results of a recount in Scott County completed over the weekend cannot be trusted, arguing "numerous votes" are missing.
Mariannette Miller-Meeks’ campaign over the weekend claimed the three-member recount board's tally of absentee ballots is off by 12 from what was recorded in the official canvass of vote by the Scott County Board of Supervisors.
"This discrepancy in results means no one can have confidence in the recount of absentee ballots in Scott County," Miller-Meeks campaign spokesperson Eric Woolson said in a statement. "A recount that cannot even get the total number of ballots correct cannot be trusted."
Democrat Rita Hart's campaign disputes the allegations.
Miller-Meeks now holds a razor-thin, 36-vote lead out of more than 394,400 votes cast in the race, according to unofficial results posted on the Iowa Secretary of State's website as of Monday morning. The Iowa state senator from Ottumwa was ahead by 47 votes earlier last week. The new vote totals reflect unofficial results submitted by 15 out of the 24 counties in the district that have completed their recounts, according to the Secretary of State's Office.
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Those results do not include Scott County, where Democrat Rita Hart picked up a net 30 more votes than Miller-Meeks in the county recount, which wrapped up Saturday evening, according to representatives from both campaigns.
The Scott County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to meet Wednesday afternoon to receive the recount board's report and consider certifying the amended results.
During Monday’s Iowa Executive Council meeting, Secretary of State Paul Pate said there was a “question whether Scott County and Johnson County will certify what they have or whether they will have attorneys involved because there are some technical challenges that they’re having.”
Pate said the issues did not involve his office but were focused at the county level.
“The goal is that we have to have it certified by Monday (Nov. 30) at 3 o’clock,” he said.
The Iowa Executive Council, in its role as the Iowa Board of Canvass, is slated to meet at 3 p.m. next Monday to certify statewide 2020 election results.
The council is made up of Pate, Gov. Kim Reynolds, State Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig, State Auditor Rob Sand and State Treasurer Mike Fitzgerald.
Miller-Meeks campaign claims the Scott County recount board -- consisting of one representative selected by each campaign and a third mutually chosen representative -- used an "illegal 'hybrid' model" for recounting votes.
Iowa law requires a recount in each precinct to be conducted either by optical-scan ballot tabulating equipment or by a hand count.
Recount boards were conducting both machine and hand recounts of ballots cast in Scott, Johnson and Clinton counties -- the three most populous in the district -- using machines to separate and then hand recount ballots the machine had trouble reading.
Hart's campaign argued some counties and recount boards had interpreted guidance from the Secretary of State to mean they cannot apply the law’s voter intent standards to any ballots in a precinct where a machine recount is being conducted, unless the board conducts a full hand recount of all the ballots in that same precinct.
With absentee ballots treated as a single precinct and some 64,000 absentee ballots in Scott County, the recount board said doing a hand count of that many ballots is impossible, given the time frame required by state law to complete the recount. Counties have 18 calendar days from their canvass of votes to complete their recounts, which would be Nov. 27 or 28, depending on when they canvassed.
According to the Hart campaign, there were more than 200 identified overvotes and 18,000 undervotes in the district that had yet to be examined for voter intent as of the middle of last week. More than 7,000 of those undervotes were in Scott and Johnson counties alone. Hart's campaign worried if recount boards could not use this hybrid approach of machine and hand recounts, that ballots containing valid votes for the candidates would not be detected with just a machine recount. And that there are enough ballots at stake to decide the outcome of the election.
The Secretary of State’s Office last week tried to provide better guidance, stating a machine recount will provide a tally report that includes the number of overvotes or undervotes in a precinct. The recount board then can decide whether to review that precinct's ballots by hand to determine whether the overvoted or undervoted ballots show clear voter intent for a candidate in the race.
An overvote occurs when a voter casts a vote for more than the allowable number of candidates. An undervote occurs when a voter makes no selection in a particular race, or chooses fewer than the allowable number of candidates in a contest. In either case, the machine may have failed to recognize a vote cast for either candidate due to an ink smudge or a stray or irregular mark on the ballot.
However, "Ultimately, the manner in which a recount board handles the mechanics of a recount is left up to the discretion of a majority of the board," Molly Widen, legal counsel for the Iowa Secretary of State's Office, wrote in response to a Hart campaign letter seeking clarification.
In Scott County, the county attorney’s office issued an opinion that using machine counts in addition to hand counting the ballots cast that the machine cannot read was permissible, and that a manual recount of all 64,000 absentee ballots is not required.
Miller-Meeks campaign, however, argues recount boards can use one or the other, but not to combine the two.
"The Scott County recount board, over the Miller-Meeks for Congress campaign’s objection and against the instructions of the Secretary of State, adopted this method," Woolson said in the statement.
The Miller-Meeks campaign argues the hybrid recount method values some ballots over others -- with ballots with overvotes checked for voter intent by the recount board, but not those with undervotes -- and risks disenfranchising voters.
The Scott County recount board, with Miller-Meek's representative objecting, adopted a machine-assisted hand count of roughly 64,000 absentee ballots that were run through a high-speed scanner, which tabulated votes for Miller-Meeks and Hart and sorted out overvotes, write-ins and unclear ballots. It did not separate out undervotes. The recount board then went through those ballots and sorted them by hand for possible votes for each candidate.
An individual with direct knowledge of the Scott County recount process, but who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the board applied the same standard to all ballots the machine separated out.
"The Hart campaign’s hybrid method also raises concerns about the accountability of the process," Woolson said. "Because Iowa law does not allow for it, there is no accepted method to ensure that the recount results are accurate. There is no way to audit the work of the recount board using the hybrid method to verify its accuracy. The recount in Scott County proves this point," with the board’s tally of absentee ballots off by 12 from the county's official canvass of votes.
Miller-Meeks campaign accuses the Hart campaign of "doing its best to distort and manipulate the process."
Hart for Iowa campaign manager Zach Meunier contends the bipartisan recount was "conducted fairly and thoroughly."
"Each individual county recount has made decisions by a majority of the three-person recount board and, in Scott County specifically, this fair and lawful process was agreed to by the board more than five days ago," Meunier said in a statement. "The Miller-Meeks campaign had no complaints during those five days, and is only now questioning the recount process as they lose ground."
Meunier, too, said the Secretary of State’s office has repeatedly made clear that the recount boards have discretion over the mechanics of conducting the recount, and that several other counties are engaged in similar hand recounts.
"The reality is the Miller-Meeks campaign is simply scared of the likelihood that when all of the ballots are counted -- they will lose," Meunier said.
-- Rod Boshart of the Cedar Rapids Gazette contributed to this story.
