Letter: Do the right thing

Editorial / Open letter to Ms. Rita Hart:

Dear Ms. Hart,

I am writing to you to express my disappointment in your decision to take your loss in the IA02 Congressional campaign to Congress. I am completely against your attempt at forcing your way into a Representative office to which you were not elected.

There are many safeguards built into our Iowa election process of which you chose not to avail yourself. Rather you are turning your hopes to an apolitical process, of which many voters in Iowa will remember. While we recognize that your race was one of the most closely contested in the history of Iowa, you lost.

Even after recounting, you still lost the race to Dr. Mariannette Miller-Meeks. It matters not whether you lost by a large margin or a single vote, you lost and the People of Iowa, District 2, decided that contest.

Your reported delayed decisions, change of mind throughout the process and perhaps your choices on the three-person recount teams led you to deciding not to take the legal but to take the political route. I believe by bypassing the Iowa statutes, you are disenfranchising every voter that voted in our election. Additionally, you are questioning the integrity of the three-person recount teams including a Democrat (your choice), a Republican and neutral third party observer, which both parties agreed to in every county; and the unanimous result of the Iowa Executive Council (three Republicans and two Democrats).

I believe voter accountability might be the challenge and opportunity here because you believe not all votes were counted. What is voter accountability? If a person double votes (marking more than one candidate in a race), who or what is to interpret what the intent of the voter is? If a person cuts off his or her overseas photo of an entire ballot cast, who or what is accountable to interpret the results? To me, the voter is accountable to ensure her/his vote can be counted as intended. There are safeguards such as asking for another ballot so eraser marks or any other mark is not interpreted incorrectly or not counted. The voter is accountable to see if her/his emailed ballot contained the entire ballot.

I urge you to do the right (and honorable) thing and retract your petition to the U.S. Congress. You lost the 2018 Lieutenant Governor race and you lost the 2020 U.S. Congressional Race. You are choosing a political outcome versus voter accountability outcome and a legal route. Is that the legacy you want?

Please reconsider.

T. Waldmann-Williams

Knoxville