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IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) – The historically tight race for the 2nd seat in the Iowa Congressional District could approach a tie.
Democrat Rita Hart reduced Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks’ lead on Wednesday to nine votes out of more than 394,400 people, with recount advice in all but two counties in the district, reporting their results.
The race is the closest to the country and could tighten even further ahead of Monday’s certification deadline. A single-digit victory for either candidate is possible, as is a tie, which under state law would result in a winner’s name being drawn from a hat, a bowl or other container.
Hart garnered 26 votes in Scott County after the recount board adjourned Wednesday without addressing a discrepancy in the number of absent ballots recorded. Her campaign says she expects to get nine votes in Jasper County as well, if the results remain unchanged after another automatic recount of the mail-in votes ends Wednesday night.
This could tie the race to Clinton County alone – where Hart lives on a Wheatland farm and served as an educator and state senator – yet to be reported.
Clinton’s recount board has already reviewed most of its ballots, with Hart having only one vote so far, County Auditor Eric Van Lancker said. The council will return on Saturday morning to complete the recount of the last 5,000 or so postal ballots, he said.
A state prospecting council is expected to meet on Monday, the legal deadline, to certify the race results. The following candidate is likely to take legal action to challenge the result of the recount, which would trigger proceedings led by a judicial panel.
The result will help determine the size of the Democrats’ slim majority in the House of Representatives and whether Republicans forfeit a second seat in Iowa. The candidates are in the running to replace Democratic Representative Dave Loebsack, who is retiring after seven terms.
Hart called for a district-wide recount after initial county certifications showed her trailing by 47 votes, following an election in which reporting errors reversed the head back and forth between the candidates.
The recount was slow but filled with drama as the race narrowed. On Wednesday, Miller-Meeks had 196,880 votes, Hart 196,845. That’s 49.91% to 49.91%, according to the Iowa Secretary of State’s office.
Scott County, the most populous in the district, was due to certify the 26-vote swing on Wednesday that would help Hart erase most of the Miller-Meeks lead. But the county council postponed the meeting after the auditor discovered that the count recorded 131 more missing ballots than the previous survey.
The county recount council met again on Wednesday to determine if and how to remedy the discrepancy, which could be the result of a machine or math error, or the discovery of un-counted ballots on the election night.
The council voted 2-1 for the adjournment, denying Delegate Miller-Meeks’ request for an automatic recount of the missing ballots.
“The recount of the mail-in ballots in Scott County was unreliable,” Miller-Meeks campaign attorney Alan Ostergren said.
Compared to the county’s previous solicitation, Hart added 105 votes and Miller-Meeks added 79.
The Miller-Meeks campaign has previously argued that the process used in Scott County to recount the votes was illegal. This involved using a machine to recount the ballots, then examining by hand those the machine could not read to determine the voter intention.
Miller-Meeks representatives argue that Iowa law requires that recounts be done by machine or by hand, not a combination of the two. Hart’s campaign notes that the process has been approved by the recount committee, which includes representatives from both campaigns and one neutral, and is supported by a Scott County legal opinion.
In Jasper County, a ballot calculator broke down during the recount and had to be repaired, county auditor Dennis Parrott said. The Miller-Meeks campaign alleged that once repaired the machine could not reliably read the ballots and contested the tally after Hart gained traction.
The recount committee introduced a new calculator on Wednesday afternoon to recount 10,999 missing ballots that were in question, Parrott said. The final results could be approved at the end of the evening.
Next, attention will turn to Clinton, where the auditor said the recount committee will meet at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday and work for hours.
“To get a congressman out of a cup of coffee, I don’t know about that one, right?” But we have these rules. If we come to a tie, we have the tiebreaker, ”Van Lancker said. “I am confident with the processes we have, we will achieve a result in which we can be confident.”
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