Rita Hart's appeal to Congress doesn't have a happy ending, especially after she passed over Iowa judges. She should concede.

Elections close enough to turn on assessments of stray and incomplete pen markings will always leave lingering questions.

But candidates' choices can temper or inflame those questions.

In Iowa's 2nd Congressional District, Rita Hart, the loser by six votes to Mariannette Miller-Meeks, has picked a path that will inflame. Her team skipped the appeal process available through Iowa's courts and elected to petition a U.S. House of Representatives panel to oversee a recount, before the full House decides the outcome.

It's true that this is a legal path and that there are legitimate reasons to question the fairness of aspects of Iowa's recount process. But even if Hart prevails, a decision that's ultimately made by a Democratic-controlled House will forever taint her service in Congress. And the move could well backfire on her party, providing Iowa Republicans a potent rallying cry of Democratic chicanery for years in races up and down the ballot.

It's worth retracing what's happened in the weeks since the Nov. 3 election, when unofficial results showed Miller-Meeks ahead by 282 votes out of nearly 394,000 cast, or just 0.07% of the votes counted. But Iowa law allows until the following Monday for absentee ballots to arrive if they were postmarked before the election. Meanwhile, counties corrected some tallying errors through their own recount processes. That shrank Miller-Meeks' lead to just 47 votes, at which point Hart called for a recount of all 24 counties in the district.

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In each county, a board with a member appointed by each party and a third mutually agreed-upon member oversaw the recount. That process added concerning inconsistency, as some boards used machine counts and some hand counts. Equity would call for all votes to be handled the same way.

And it's head-scratching why recount boards didn't reconcile some discrepancies. Scott County's recount board rejected a request by Miller-Meeks for a fresh machine recount of absentee ballots after a 131-vote discrepancy in the total.

When the 24-county recount ended, Miller-Meeks' margin had shrunk to a hair-thin six votes. That vote was certified Nov. 30 by the state's bipartisan Board of Canvass.

That's when Hart made her decision to ask the U.S. House to decide the election.

Her main contention is that Iowa law does not allow enough time for a fair, thorough recount process to decide a congressional election. She's right about that.

Iowa Code requires that the contest court would have had to be formed and the recount launched, executed and concluded by Dec. 8. With nearly 400,000 votes cast, the five judges of the contest court and the campaigns would have faced a monumental if not impossible task to organize and carry out a credible investigation.

But going through that process would have demonstrated a commitment to having neutral Iowa arbiters resolve vote-counting problems instead of out-of-state partisans. And the option to go to the House would still have been available. 

No matter the outcome, change is needed

In the best-case scenario for Hart, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office conducts a recount with integrity, the lead flips to her, and Democrats in the majority in the House Committee on Administration and in the full House vote to seat her sometime in 2021.

That last part, where Democrats in power decide a Democrat won the election, is what will be remembered. 

Marc Elias, an attorney prominent nationally for his work on election disputes, is working on Hart's case and pointed out to a Register editorial writer that it's the norm for elected bodies to be the final arbiter of their membership. True enough. Iowans don't have to look further back than 2019 to see the ugliness that can ensue, when majority Iowa House Republicans dismissed a Democrat's challenge to the re-election of Michael Bergan to a northeast Iowa seat. A handful of mailed ballots were excluded from the count.

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Gov. Kim Reynolds should appoint a bipartisan commission to look at laws and procedures for recounts and other measures before certification and for challenges after votes are certified. That bipartisan commission could recommend legislation that would provide for more uniformity in precertification county procedures and make the contest court a more realistic option. The time constraints Hart bemoans are likely to be a hurdle for almost any narrowly trailing candidate.

Hart should concede, and run again

With every election, there are ballots where a voter appears to have voted for more than one candidate, or skips voting in a race or makes a smudge that looks like a vote — or not.

At every step in Iowa's process, bipartisan groups of Iowans gather in public to make decisions intended to honor a voter's intent.

Hart could have granted a powerful endorsement to Iowa's election system by conceding. She should reconsider and do that now, for the sake of her party and all Iowans. Iowa doesn't need more partisan bile infecting its politics, especially at a time when state government and its congressional delegation should be focused on helping Iowans stay safe in the COVID-19 pandemic and weather its financial hardships.

And then Hart should run again. She needs only to look at Miller-Meeks, a first-time winner in her fourth bid for Congress, to recognize the virtue of persistence.

Meanwhile, all Iowans should welcome Miller-Meeks as a new member of Iowa's congressional delegation. Miller-Meeks served in the U.S. Army for 24 years, where she gained her training as an ophthalmologist. She worked in private practice in Ottumwa, served as a director of the Iowa Department of Public Health and was elected as a state senator in 2018. 

While this editorial board disagrees with many of her policy positions, she has shown herself to be smart, hardworking and thoughtful, and we believe she will serve Iowans well.