Recounts in Iowa Senate District 10, House 1, House 37

Looks like not one, not two, but three Iowa legislative districts will see recounts in the next few days:

In Black Hawk County, Republican Walt Rogers wants a recount in Senate District 10. An administrative recount of two precincts narrowed incumbent Democrat Jeff Danielson's lead in the Senate District 10 race to 14 votes.

Also with a 14 vote margin: Republican Renee Schulte in House District 37, where the Gazette reports that incumbent Democrat Art Staed wants a recount.

In Woodbury County, Republican Jeremy Taylor is asking for a recount. Taylor is 60 votes behind incumbent Democrat Wes Whitead in House District 1.

Some recount 101: Each candidate, the apparent loser and the apparent winner, names a representative to a recount board. The two representatives then name a third board member who is mutually acceptable and presumably neutral. (If they can't agree, a judge chooses someone.) The recount board makes the decisions, while the auditor's office provides assistance.

Woodbury County Concludes Counting

Dems Hold 3 of 4 Close Races as Whitead, Wendt Win in Woodbury

While recounts remain possible, incumbent Democrats appear to have won three of the state's four closest races while losing one seat.

In Woodbury County, Democrats held on to win two tight House races. In Iowa House District 1 incumbent Democrat Wes Whitead had 6,152 votes and Republican Jeremy Taylor won 6,092. At the end of Election Night, Whitead had a six-vote lead. In Iowa House District 2, incumbent Democrat Roger Wendt had 4,709, ahead of Republican Rick Bertrand with 4,429.

Whitead and Wendt were both showing up as losers for several hours on Election Night due to delays in counting absentee ballots, which leaned heavily Democratic across the state. The Sioux City Journal reports that Woodbury County had absentee counting problems related to the new state law requiring absentee ballots to be tabulated by precinct.

Late absentee results also had Rep. Elesha Gayman listed as a loser in House District 84 in Scott County for a while on Election Night, but the first-term Democrat regained the lead, and the seat, with the absentees.

In Linn County, four out of nine late-arriving absentees were postmarked on time and counted in House District 37. The Linn County Auditor's office reports that two went to Republican challenger Renee Schulte and two were for Democratic incumbent Art Staed, leaving Schulte with a 14 vote lead.

An email press release from House Democrats Wednesday afternoon began with the line "After expanding their majority to 56 in last week’s election"--math which would appear to exclude Staed.

At the Black Hawk County canvass, the formal meeting where county supervisors certify results, incumbent Democrat Jeff Danielson had a 17 vote lead over GOP challenger Walt Rogers in Senate District 10. The Waterloo Courier reports that Rogers was confident enough in his Election Night lead that he gave a victory speech, while "Danielson was dejectedly leaving the Democrats' party even before President-elect Barack Obama delivered his own victory speech."

Recounts Unlikely To Change Much

Recounts Rarely Change Much

With a handful of Iowa legislative races within double digits or even single digits, and three U.S. Senate races yet to be decided, the word "recount" is buzzing in the air.

While a recount may give a losing candidate emotional satisfaction and a sense of closure, the vote shifts tend to be very, very small.

I don't mention my day job here much, but I've worked in the Johnson County Auditor's Office for the past 11 years (which explains why you didn't see as many of my stories the last couple weeks before the election). In that time, I've had hands-on experience with three recounts.

In 1999, we re-fed all the ballots from an Iowa City council race, nearly 8,000, and only one vote shifted, narrowing a three vote lead down to two. In a three-county recount in a 2002 state senate race, about three votes moved. In 2005 a recount in the North Liberty mayor's race changed no votes at all out of over 1,000 ballots fed into the machine. The write-in winner lost a couple votes because the recount board interpreted the spelling of his name just a little more strictly than the Election Day poll workers, and tossed a couple votes where they though the name was too vague. That wasn't enough to change the outcome.

Multiply those one or two vote county shifts by a whole state with a 200 or so vote margin, which is where the Al Franken-Norm Coleman U.S. Senate race sits in Minnesota, and you might have something. But a state legislative district that's, say, 100 votes? Highly unlikely.

In fact, the big shifts have already happened with the decisions on the provisional ballots as boards met Thursday and Friday. Those boards also counted absentee ballots that arrived on Wednesday and Thursday, but were postmarked by the day before the election.

Sure, more absentees might show up before canvasses make the results final next week, but there's a law of diminishing returns. Auditors don't all of a sudden get a bigger pile of absentees in the mail six days after the election than they do one day after the election. And the later it gets, the more likely it is that those ballots have an Election Day postmark and are thus worthless.

Given the heavily Democratic nature of Iowa's absentee voting this year, any Republican who's trailing is harder pressed catch up, which means state Sen. Jeff Danielson in Waterloo, who trailed Election Night, is likely to hold his single digit lead. But that doesn't necessarily mean a Democrat who's trailing, like state Rep. Art Staed, who's down by a couple dozen votes, will either.

In what appears to be the state's closest race, the Sioux City Journal reported Thursday that Republican challenger Jeremy Taylor had a one vote lead in House District 1 over incumbent Democrat Wes Whitead, with 234 ballots left to count. Whitead had a six vote lead at the end of Election Night.