Exclusive: Democrat-requested House recount costs taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars; Republicans stopped “illegal recount method”

The Democrats' doomed effort to oust Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks is set to cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.

A recount of Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks’s (R., Iowa) narrowly-won election is set to cost taxpayers at least $23,163.24; during the legal battle, Miller-Meeks’s team stopped the Democrats from employing an “illegal recount method,” it told the Washington Reporter.

Miller-Meeks faced a spirited rematch from failed Democratic candidate and former engineering intern Christina Bohannan, who came within several hundred votes of unseating Miller-Meeks this cycle, after losing by over 20,000 votes in 2022. However, Bohannan’s team attempted to employ a series of legally questionable moves which were defeated by Miller-Meeks’s campaign.

“They wanted what was called a ‘hybrid’ recount method where they would separate out the overvotes and undervotes and then apply hand counting standards to those ballots,” Alan Ostergren, one of Miller-Meeks’s lawyers, told the Reporter. “The problem is that it is prone to double counting ballots. In 2020 we lost a net of 36 votes because of double counting by recount boards. The code only permits machine recount or a full hand count. Democrats wanted to manipulate the process to manufacture votes by double counting in Democratic counties.”

Miller-Meeks is familiar with close elections and recount battless. In 2020, she won her first election to Congress by six votes against Rita Hart, the current chair of the Democratic Party of Iowa. “Iowa’s election integrity laws, which I voted for as a state senator, give Iowans confidence in our system,” she told the Reporter. Following Hart’s loss to Miller-Meeks, House Democrats led by then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi spent over $500,000 of taxpayer money on left-leaning lawyers who helped overturn the election, even after it was certified by Iowa’s Secretary of State.

National Democrats’ support for overturning Miller-Meeks’s 2020 election stands in stark contrast to their tepid support for Bohannan’s failed 2024 election denialism. Bohannan’s legal efforts were more tepid than Hart’s were, Ostergren noted. “I think she pulled it together herself. They were very disorganized,” he said. “Her recount board designees in each county were clearly not trained on the process. Maybe she thought as a law professor she could just do it herself. But she couldn’t.”

Both Hart and Bohannan are “election deniers and two-time election losers to Miller-Meeks,” an Iowa Republican strategist told the Reporter. Bohannan, who has never conceded her 2022 defeat to Miller-Meeks, may run again in 2026.