Democrat Christina Bohannan announced on Thursday she will request a recount of the vote in all 20 counties of Iowa’s 1st Congressional District. According to current vote totals reported by the Associated Press, incumbent Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks leads Bohannan by 801 votes out of the 413,079 votes cast in the district.
The official canvas of votes that will certify the results of all the races on the ballot in the general election is not yet complete. The AP also hasn’t yet called the race in the 1st District.
As of noon on Thursday, the AP was reporting Miller-Meeks received 206,940 votes, 50.1 percent of the total, and Bohannan received 206,139, or 49.9 percent of the votes cast.
In a statement posted on social media on Thursday, Bohannan called Miller-Meeks’ lead in the still-unofficial results “a razor-thin margin.”
“To be absolutely certain that every voter is heard, I will request a recount in all 20 counties across the district, as permitted by Iowa law,” Bohannan said in the posted statement. “We have full trust in this process and will accept the results regardless of the outcome.”
Miller-Meeks declared victory on Election Night, and on Thursday her campaign issued a statement saying the two-term incumbent “remains confident” that she’s won reelection.
“This is a delaying tactic to thwart the will of the people,” according to the statement. “A recount won’t meaningfully change the outcome of this race as the congresswoman’s lead is mathematically impossible to overcome.”
Speaking to Iowa Starting Line’s new politics podcast, Cornhole Champions, earlier this week, Professor Derek Muller of the University of Notre Dame Law School also said the math was against Bohannan.
“When I look at how accurate the optical-scan systems are… 796 [the reported difference between Miller-Meeks and Bohannan when the interview was recorded] is essentially an insurmountable outcome,” Muller told Iowa Starting Line’s Zachary Oren Smith. “Even when there are 400,000 ballots that have been cast.”
Muller teaches election law at Notre Dame, and has practical experience in recounts. In 2020, he was teaching at the University of Iowa and was asked by the Miller-Meeks campaign to be its representative on the three-person recount board in Johnson County as votes in that year’s congressional race underwent a recount. (Another member of the recount board was selected by Democratic candidate Rita Hart’s campaign, then the two campaign representatives selected a neutral third member.)
The results reported on election night in 2020 had Miller-Meeks leading Hart by 282 votes for the House seat that became open when Dave Loebsack decided not to run for reelection. Before the law was changed in 2021, mail-in ballots were considered valid as long as they were postmarked by Election Day, and received in the country auditor’s office by the Monday following the election, so vote totals changed in the week after Election Day. By the time the recount started, Miller-Meeks was ahead by just 47 votes.
The results changed during the recount largely due to clerical errors in a couple of the county auditors’ offices, but the recount finally resulted in six-vote lead for Miller-Meeks.
In Johnson County, the recount of the county’s slightly more than 84,000 votes resulted in a net gain of three votes for Hart.
“It was a long week, where not very much changed. Part of that is a testament to how accurate I think the optical scan machines are in tabulating ballots in the state, but when the margin is ultimately six, every vote counts,” Muller said.
According to Muller, unless there are “some systematic errors that are consistently helping one candidate over another” a recount is unlikely to shift many votes. Even with such systematic errors “you’d probably need 4 million to 8 million votes to even think about an 800-vote margin as being the kind of thing within a recount range,” he added.
Bohannan has not suggested there were any systematic errors in the election, but says a recount is needed so Iowans “feel confident that at the conclusion of this transparent, precinct-level recount process, every lawful vote will be counted and reported accurately.”
The current reported difference of 801 votes means this election was substantially closer than the 2022 election, in which Bohannan challenged Miller-Meeks for the 1st District seat in the U.S. House. In 2022, Miller-Meeks beat Bohannan by 20,173 votes.
