Iowa school board candidate asks court to declare election tied

A district court will have the chance to rule on an eastern Iowa school board election last year in which the initial vote, recount and certification all are in dispute.

November's election saw Jameson Smith challenge incumbent Tracey Rivera for a seat on the Pleasant Valley school board in Scott County. Due to an error with her nominating petition, Rivera ran as a write-in candidate. Initial unofficial results showed Smith with a six-vote lead, but a recount found a dead tie, meaning the race would have been decided by a coin-flip under Iowa law.

Instead, the Scott County Board of Supervisors in December rejected the results of the recount, giving Smith the victory.

In a new lawsuit, Rivera says the county board exceeded its authority in rejecting the recount results, and accuses a representative of Smith's campaign of doctoring the recount results to sow confusion. She asks the court to order the board to accept the tie result, clearing the way for the coin flip to decide the final result.

Scott County declined to comment on the litigation. Attorneys for Smith, who is not a defendant in the lawsuit, and Rivera did not return messages seeking comment.

What happened after the recount?

Recounts are conducted by a three-person panel, with each candidate naming one member who then pick a third between them.

According to Rivera's complaint, filed Dec. 22, the recount she requested took place Nov. 27 and 28, and all three members signed off on the result: a dead tie of 255 to 255. After the panel filed its report with Scott County Auditor Kerri Tompkins, however, the panel member appointed by Smith's campaign, Cyndi Diercks, took the report back and made changes to the report, including entire new pages, that changed the results without the signatures of the other panel members, the lawsuit alleges.

At the county board's Dec. 4 meeting, attorneys for the county told board members that they were required by law to confirm the findings of the original recount report, bearing the signatures of the full panel, but by a vote of 3 to 2, the board refused. Vice chair John Maxwell, one of the no votes, said he believed it was a matter of election integrity, according to KWQC.

"Even though the law said for us to vote yes, I think we’re more than ministerial," he said. "I think we are at a point where we have to oversee the votes. And in this case, we know for sure that they incorrectly counted the votes.”

In her complaint, though, Rivera says the board has no such discretion, and asks the court for a writ ordering the board to approve the recount result.

This isn't the only recent Scott County election that has resulted in controversy. Republican Luana Stoltenberg won election to a state House district in 2022 after two recounts showed her with an 11-vote edge, a process that found sizable disparities between machine and hand counts of the ballots.

Who were the candidates?

Pleasant Valley School Board elections are nonpartisan. In a questionnaire for the Quad City Times, Smith, the challenger, aligned himself with conservative activists who oppose what they believe to be "pornographic" books being made available to children, and said his top priorities would be school safety, increased transparency with parents, and more options for students to obtain associate's degrees while still in high school.

Smith was one of several candidates to be supported by an outside political action committee in the school board campaign, but was the only one to win his race, according to the Times.

Related: Federal judge blocks enforcement of Iowa law banning school books, gender identity instruction

Rivera, in her questionnaire, said she also planned to focus on communication with families and preparing students for post-graduation success, as well as teacher retention.

William Morris covers courts for the Des Moines Register. He can be contacted at wrmorris2@registermedia.com, 715-573-8166 or on Twitter at @DMRMorris.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa school board candidate sues over election recount tampering