Iowa Democrat will challenge election results with House

[brooklynite]

Source: Politico

A Democratic candidate who fell six votes short of holding an open battleground congressional district in Iowa is planning to challenge those results directly with the House, placing the chamber in the highly unusual position of potentially determining the outcome of the race.

After what appears to be the tightest congressional election in decades, Rita Hart, a state senator, has decided to forgo a legal battle in her home state and will instead contest the election directly with the House Administration Committee. Iowa election officials certified Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks as the winner on Monday after a recount diminished her initial victory margin from 47 votes to only 6 votes.

The move, the aggressiveness of which has stunned some Democrats, will trigger a rarely used congressional process, which was memorably deployed to settle an election in the mid-1980s. But the stakes are high: Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a severely diminished majority, which could be as small as five votes after sustaining unexpected losses last month.

But some Democrats question the optics of challenging certified election results, as President Donald Trump still refuses to concede and makes baseless claims of widespread election fraud, despite losing by much larger margins than the Iowa race.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/02/rita-hart-iowa-challenge-election-results-442224