Iowa’s election recount laws still need fix, county officials insist

DES MOINES — Ever since a protracted recount of an Eastern Iowa congressional election in 2020 was conducted with a patchwork of procedures, state and local elections officials have asked Iowa lawmakers to provide consistency and certainty to the recount laws.

But four legislative sessions have come and gone without the recount cleanup Iowa elections officials have requested.

Yet another attempt is being made this year, with two state legislators new to the effort leading the charge — and thus far taking different approaches with their proposals.

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Whether any potential recounts in Iowa’s 2026 elections in Iowa will be conducted in a consistent manner across all involved precincts and counties depends in no small part on whether that latest attempt to pass legislation is successful.

Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, who has proposed multiple bills addressing recounts and other elections procedures, is hopeful.

Pate’s proposals are being moved in the Iowa Senate, while bills with different elections law proposals are advancing in the Iowa House.

“We are optimistic that the Iowa Legislature will pass legislation that implements important updates to Iowa’s election processes,” Pate said in a statement to The Gazette. “Iowa legislators get it — they recognize the importance of standardized processes and strong election laws. We’re working with both chambers to ensure that strong legislation reaches the governor’s desk this year.”

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In 2020, Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks won an Eastern Iowa congressional election by just six votes out of more than 394,000 cast. The recount certified Miller-Meeks as the winner, but during the process, counties used different methods for recounting ballots, errors were made in two counties and a discrepancy in Scott County was never explained.

Candidate Rita Hart, now chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, considered challenging the results to the U.S. House — which at that time was controlled by Democrats — but ultimately withdrew her challenge.

In the years that have followed that messy recount, Pate and county auditors — who conduct elections at the local level — have implored state lawmakers to amend Iowa’s elections laws to ensure future recounts are conducted with consistency.

“From the auditors’ perspective, recount reform has been a legislative priority of ours for at least three legislative sessions now,” said Adam Wedmore, the Cerro Gordo County auditor and current president of the Iowa State Association of County Auditors. “We have firsthand experience the shortcomings of the current code that outlines recounts, and we have seen potential for significant problems with recounts as they’re currently allowed to be done.”

Bills have been introduced in recent sessions, and some had bipartisan support early on. But none earned enough support to be passed along to Gov. Kim Reynolds for her signature.

This year, two state lawmakers for the first time have taken the lead on elections bills: Sen. Ken Rozenboom, a Republican from Pella who is the new chair of the Senate’s State Government Committee, and Rep. Austin Harris, a Republican from Moulton.

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Statehouse Republicans have complete control of the state lawmaking process by virtue of their majorities in both the Iowa House and Senate to go with Reynolds, a fellow Republican.

There are multiple elections bills moving in the Legislature this year. While they mostly have the same end goal in streamlining and providing more consistency in Iowa’s elections laws, in some cases they vary greatly on how to accomplish that.

Recount procedures

Pate’s proposal, being moved by Senate Republicans, allows for recount boards — the personnel who conduct recounts — to be larger in counties with larger populations. Under current state law, all recount boards — no matter the size of the county — must have exactly three members.

Pate’s bill, Senate File 543, would allow counties with populations between 15,000 and 49,999 to have five members and counties with populations of 50,000 or more to have seven members.

Rep. Harris’ bill, House File 928, would provide flexibility for larger counties to establish larger recount boards. His proposal also would change the makeup of recount boards.

Currently, recount boards are comprised of one representative from each of the candidates’ campaigns and one neutral member agreed to by both campaigns. The neutral member was established to resolve any disputes that arise during the recount process.

Harris’ bill instead would make recount boards comprised fully of county auditors’ staff. Harris said he made the proposal because he believes some campaigns in recent Iowa recounts have placed lawyers on the recount boards in an attempt to influence decisions about ballots when those disputes arise.

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“I think one of the problems we have is that we put campaigns — who then in turn put lawyers — in charge of the recount process, and though I’m not assigning nefarious motives to anybody, but what that does is you have people recounting the votes whose, probably their main objective is not to get an accurate result, is to get the outcome for their candidate,” Harris said.

“And that’s not the case in every process,” Harris said. “But I think when you go back and look at 2020, where you had members of the recount boards who wanted to count certain ballots a certain way in one county and wanted to count ballots a different way in another county, that objective is to make sure that they’re trying to get the best result for their candidate, not the accurate result.”

Wedmore said county auditors largely would be comfortable executing either strategy, although he raised the concern that Harris’ proposal could put auditors or their staff in the difficult position of making decisions during the recount process that could be viewed politically — auditors are elected in partisan elections — or even on a recount in their own election.

“It’s a little more high importance, high visibility, than the role that we already do,” Wedmore said. “As auditors, we perform fair, impartial elections, and even though our name is on that ballot, we’re still going to conduct those elections in a fair manner. But certainly it does add another layer of scrutiny and concern there when we could, in theory, be auditing or recounting our own race.”

Harris said he is willing to look at that specific concern in his legislation. Rozenboom said on that topic, legislators need to “sort that out and find common ground.”

Wedmore also said auditors would prefer the expansion of recount boards to be calculated by votes cast rather than population. He said a large county could have recounts in both high- and low-turnout elections — like a recount in a congressional election vs. a school board election — which makes calculating recount board sizes by votes cast more logical.

Pate’s bill also establishes a timeline for when recounts must be conducted and requires the same method of recounting — either by machine or by hand — to be used in all counties in which a recount is conducted.

Recount thresholds

Under current law, any candidate can request a recount. The candidate’s campaign pays for any expenses incurred by elections officials during the recount unless the original results margin is fewer than 50 votes or less than 1 percent. The candidate requesting the recount otherwise is responsible for posting a bond, but the bond is returned if the winner changes.

Under Harris’ bill, only election outcomes decided by a margin of 1 percent or less would be eligible for recounts, and campaigns would pay for the recount unless the outcome was less than .1 percent.

Pate’s proposal does not alter the state’s recount thresholds.

Harris said he believes some recounts have been requested in recent years that had no true hope of changing the election’s outcome. When asked, Harris said the 2024 recount in Miller-Meeks’ district — this one against Democrat Christina Bohannan — would be one example of what he believes to be an unnecessary recount.

In that election, the unofficial results on election night showed Miller-Meeks ahead of Bohannon by 802 votes out of roughly 414,000 cast, a margin of roughly .2 percent. A district-wide recount changed Miller-Meeks’ victory margin by only three votes.

“I think we’ve had multiple recounts in the last three cycles that were, quite frankly, just not necessary,” Harris said. “We have to keep in mind that when you request a recount, you are almost asserting that you believe the result is wrong. And I think that standard has to be pretty high to do that.”

As for lowering the threshold for which the state pays for a recount to just .1 percent, Harris described that proposal as a taxpayer protection.

“The taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for a recount that we know is just not going to change the outcome,” Harris said.

“We want people to be able to request it or do a recount if they so wish, and that’s why we allow that still within a 1 percent threshold. But if you want the taxpayers to pay for something, then the result should be so close that it is plausible that the machines did not get it right the first time. … It’s not on the taxpayers to fund a recount simply because someone doesn’t want to accept the outcome of the election.”

Major party status threshold

Current law grants major political party status to any party whose candidate for governor or president earns at least 2 percent of the general election vote.

Major party status in Iowa gives parties a designated spot on the ballot in partisan elections, access to state-run primary elections and appearing as an option on voter registration forms.

Under another House Republican bill, House File 954, that threshold would be raised from 2 to 10 percent.

“I think if you want to be a major political party, then you actually have to show that you have a coalition of voters out there who are behind you and support you,” Harris said. “Doesn’t mean that you have to win an election. It’d be pretty difficult to win an election with 10 percent of the vote. But it shows that there’s an actual following out there of voters who believe in a message or the principles of the party.”

Such a requirement would most directly impact the Libertarian Party in Iowa, which has alternated between earning and then subsequently losing major party status in recent election cycles.

The Libertarian Party of Iowa gained political party status for the first time in 2016 when Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson earned 3.74 percent of the Iowa vote. But Iowa Libertarians lost that status in the next election when candidate Jake Porter failed to reach the 2 percent threshold in the 2018 governor’s race.

Iowa Libertarians regained major party status in 2022 when their gubernatorial candidate Rick Stewart earned 2.4 percent of the vote in the general election. But they lost it again in 2024 when the party’s presidential candidate Chase Oliver failed to reach 2 percent in Iowa.

“I think what we’ve seen over the last 10, 20 years is that people are attaining major political party status simply because of a protest vote,” Harris said. “And I’m sorry, but you’re not a major political party if you’re just someone’s protest vote.”

The Libertarian Party of Iowa condemned the proposal, saying in a statement it “would effectively eliminate alternative parties from the political landscape, denying Iowans the right to real electoral choices.”

“This is nothing more than an effort to rig the system in favor of the political establishment,” Libertarian Party of Iowa Chair Jules Cutler said in a statement. “Iowans deserve better than a system designed to suppress competition and limit their choices at the ballot box.”

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Pate’s bills do not propose changing the threshold for major party status, and Rozenboom said 10 percent is too high. He said other ways to address the same topic could instead require a lower percentage be attained in multiple consecutive election cycles.

“We’re going to talk about that,” Rozenboom said.

Registered voters’ citizenship verification

Another bill proposed by Pate and advancing in the Senate would require an Iowa voter’s registration to be canceled if the individual submits documentation to the state or federal government that says he or she is not a U.S. citizen. The bill, Senate File 550, would allow the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office to contract with federal, state and private agencies to obtain information that would help the state remove non-naturalized U.S. citizens from its voter registration lists.

It is a similar proposal to one that Pate employed during the 2024 election in his effort to stop noncitizens from voting in Iowa’s elections. It is a felony in Iowa for a non-U.S. citizen to vote or register to vote.

“While we have seen successful, smooth, and fair elections here in Iowa, finetuning these processes will allow us to build on that momentum and maintain Iowa’s election integrity moving forward,” Pate said in his statement.

Will a bill pass into law this year?

All of the bills earned sufficient approval by the first legislative “funnel” deadline this month and thus remain eligible for future consideration this session. To survive the next funnel deadline in early April, the bills must be passed out of one full chamber and a committee in the other chamber.

Pate said he is “optimistic” and Wedmore said he is “hopeful.” Wedmore said already this year there has been more legislative work on elections bills than recent, previous sessions.

“I feel that the last few years of us talking to legislators have paid dividends, and that they understand the process and it’s starting to hit home and they recognize that it’s an area that can and should be improved,” Wedmore said.

Rozenboom said he feels no sense of urgency to pass something this year, noting the same group of legislators meets again next year before the fall 2026 elections. Harris said he is “cautiously optimistic.”

“I think we need to get it done specifically this year, so that way our county auditors (and) our Secretary of State have a good idea what to expect when it comes to 2026 (elections),” Harris said.

“I’ve met with Democrat county auditors who are supportive of this bill. There’s some things we still need to work out, some kinks that will be fixed. But relatively, even people who are a different political party than me believe that this needs to get done this year,” Harris said. “And I think county auditors are really leaning heavily on their legislators to push that.”

Comments: (515) 355-1300, erin.murphy@thegazette.com

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