Hopeful seeks House probe of tight race

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Democrat Rita Hart asked the U.S. House on Tuesday to investigate and overturn the race that Iowa said she lost by six votes, arguing that 22 ballots were wrongly excluded and others weren’t examined during the recount.

In a notice of contest, Hart argued that she would have netted 15 votes and defeated Republican Mariannette Miller-meeks had the 22 ballots been tallied in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District.

Hart’s filing asks the Democratic-led House to nullify the state-certified results, count the excluded ballots and conduct a uniform hand recount in the district’s 24 counties. She expressed confidence she will be the winner after that process.

“Although it is admittedly tempting to close the curtain on the 2020 election cycle, prematurely ending this contest would disenfranchise Iowa voters and award the congressional seat to the candidate who received fewer lawful votes,” Hart lawyer Marc Elias wrote in the 176page filing.

Elias, a veteran of election contests nationwide, called it “an exceptionally unlikely scenario” for a candidate to be able to identify enough specific wrongly rejected ballots that could change an election’s outcome.

But Miller-meeks and other Republicans accused Hart of seeking to be installed through a partisan power grab after losing a close election involving nearly 400,000 voters.

“Hart now wants a process run by one Californian, Nancy Pelosi, and decided in Washington’s hyper-partisan, dysfunctional atmosphere and not according to Iowa law,” said Miller-meeks, who has 30 days to respond to Hart’s filing.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Hart “an excellent candidate” this month, and said the chamber will decide who it will seat after the contest process.