Democrat Says She Won US House Seat from Iowa; Now Contesting the Results

NightHawkeye said:

From the "Fox guarding the henhouse, or Democrats do it too", files: Democrat Says She Won Contested Race for US House Seat

Democratic congressional candidate Rita Hart filed a notice of contest Tuesday asserting she won a contested race for a U.S. House seat representing Iowa.
...
Hart said recently she wouldn’t challenge the certification of the race in state courts. She is turning to a challenge allowed under the Federal Contested Elections Act. If the House agrees to take up the challenge, it will conduct an investigation into the race and determine who won.

Representing Hart is Marc Elias, a Perkins Coie attorney who has repeatedly criticized President Donald Trump’s challenges to election results.​

Hmm ...
Let's see here. She won't challenge the election in court, presumably because the courts would throw it out, but she will challenge it in the House of Representatives where Democrats are in control ... and Democrats can determine the outcome which benefits them. With the DNC's high-powered lawyers backing her, what are the odds that her opponent, the Republican Miller-Meeks might prevail?

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Here's a question that just *might* matter:

What's the margin of victory? (And does one need to take off their socks to count it?)

NightHawkeye said:

It's already been recounted and the Democrat got to massage the count to her advantage ... but still came up short by six votes. Now she wants more but has no evidence to take to court.

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A margin of 6 votes is an extremely close election. A margin of tens of thousands of votes isn't.

NightHawkeye said:

It's already been recounted and the Democrat got to massage the count to her advantage ... but still came up short by six votes. Now she wants more but has no evidence to take to court.

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You fail to get the point. This election in Iowa may end up as a six vote loss for this Democrat. There may not be anymore challenges open, but it is *not* an analogy for the presidential election. While this election's difference can be counted on two hands, the smallest margin in any of the state elections for the electoral college is *larger* than all of the digits on every member of Congress (actually about twice that). No matter where we are procedurally for either the Iowa congressional election or the Presidential election, the margins are vastly different.

There are no allegations from either side that any fraud was involved. It is about a small number of ballots and whether they should be counted. Both sides were prepared for this possibility with the race so tight. The last time this procedure was used was during the Reagan administration. The GAO ultimately made the final call.

The process is a rarity: Congress last took at petition up 35 years ago. In January 1985, a Democratic-controlled House voted not to seat either candidate in Indiana's 8th Congressional District race. After a long recount process, the nonpartisan General Accounting Office found that Democrat Frank McCloskey had won the race by four votes. House Democrats then voted to seat McCloskey, reversing the result of the state's recount to the protest of Republicans, who walked out of the chamber.

NightHawkeye said:

No. I would counter that you fail to get the point. There is a process to handle disputed elections.

Both parties use the process to their advantage. That's a good thing. Civil war to resolve disputes is not nearly so attractive.

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And we've been using them. The difference in the presidential election is just of such a greater scale that the kind of ordinary dispute/challenge items that might change this Iowa congressional election are not large enough to change any of the state's electoral votes. I think it is perfect normal to think that this Iowa election will end with the Democrat losing by 6 votes, as things stand now.

Where we really differ is that you seem to think some of these "massive fraud" claims have credibility and I don't. Those are the *only* things that had even the *slightest* chance of changing the presidential election. Whatever value those had their time is passed.

NightHawkeye said:

My understanding is that there is a principle of law where refusal to allow discovery is itself taken as an admission of guilt.

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So when is Trump releasing his tax returns then?

NightHawkeye said:

When the audit is completed.

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And if you believe that I have a bridge in Alaska to sell you.

Strathos said:

So when is Trump releasing his tax returns then?

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Pow!

NightHawkeye said:

When the audit is completed.

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You know that nobody believes that you believe that.

Strathos said:

And if you believe that I have a bridge in Alaska to sell you.

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The Sarah Palin Bridge to Irrelevance.

Not on the OP exactly but Tim Pool ran this story a few days back, how Democrats and liberal media folks are discussing potential voting irregularities in McConnell's election that in many ways mirrors the suspicious voting irregularities of Trump vs. Biden in a number of states.

Pavel Mosko said:

Not on the OP exactly but Tim Pool ran this story a few days back, how Democrats and liberal media folks are discussing potential voting irregularities in McConnell's election that in many ways mirrors the suspicious voting irregularities of Trump vs. Biden in a number of states.

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The shoe being on the other foot......

That said, gotta prove it to use it.

Again, if a margin of only 6 votes is the difference, then standard investigations, recounts, and irregularities could easily sway the outcome. That isn't comparable to a case where you would have to overturn half a dozen states with margins of tens of thousands of votes each.

NightHawkeye said:

It's already been recounted and the Democrat got to massage the count to her advantage ... but still came up short by six votes. Now she wants more but has no evidence to take to court.

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Contesting elections and taking them to court without evidence is all the rage right now. Not sure why she isn't going to court, but who can blame her for wanting to get in on the contesting bandwagon?

I could not read the biased source since they demand an email, and I am not letting crazies have my private information. So I found a reliable source:

Hart Asks for House Recount

"
Hart's legal counsel, Marc Elias, says they've identified 22 ballots from the 24 counties in southeast Iowa that were legally cast, but not counted.


"One thing we should all agree on, whether we're on one side of the aisle or the other, is that no voter should be dis-enfranchised due to election official error and certainly should not be further dis-enfranchised because Iowa law doesn't allow those ballots to be recounted."

Iowa law says ballots not included in the original count will not be included in any recount.Elias says one absentee ballot was rejected because of where the voter signed their name. "This wasn't a circumstance in which they didn't sign, it wasn't a circumstance in which their signature didn't match, It was simply a circumstance in which the election official didn't like where they signed. No one's ballot should be rejected on that basis." And when these ballots are included, he says Hart will have won the race. Asking the US House to step in is based on a law approved in the late 1960's, that's been used since then, according to Elias, by both Republican and Democratic candidates. "

It seems pretty clear. The ballots are there. At least one was rejected for rather petty reasons. Since those votes were not counted no one even knows who they were for. She could lose by a larger margin or win.