Disputed Highland bond issue gets court hearing

WASHINGTON — A contentious bond issue for the Highland school district went before a judge Tuesday morning, where petitioners argued the referendum should be thrown out thanks to at least 70 ballots counted in its election from voters who lived outside the district, but were accidentally given a chance to vote on its finances.

The almost 90-minute ordeal at the Washington County Courthouse came months after poll workers at a precinct in Ainsworth mistakenly handed out 96 Election Day ballots containing the Highland bond question to voters who didn’t live in the district, and therefore lacked standing in a matter expected to shape its property taxes for the next 20 years.

The school district scored a 2-1 victory from a lower “contest court” in January, where the majority of panelists upheld the bond measure citing Iowa Code Chapter 57.4, which invalidates election results only if disregarding every vote in an erroneous precinct would change the overall result. In this case, it would not: Ainsworth made up a quarter of the votes in the Nov. 5 election, but ballots at every other precinct would still add up to a passing margin for the bond issue, with or without the inclusion of its voters.

“The school district is not disputing the fact that improper ballots were distributed, for a time, within the Ainsworth precinct,” school district Attorney Andrew Tice said at Tuesday’s hearing. “What the school district maintains is that, that furnishing of improper ballots, under these circumstances, doesn’t change the result of the election, so therefore, the election contest fails.”

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With only 26 undervotes from the precinct, petitioners have argued the at-least 70 improper ballots should nullify the election’s outcome, and force a redo at a later date. While it’s unknown how those invalid voters cast their ballots, challengers argue the number “called into question” the measure’s passing margin of just 22 points on Election Day.

Petitioner Attorney Sasha Finke said the contest court decision, based on an evaluation of results without the Ainsworth precinct, effectively disenfranchised the hundreds of eligible voters who went to the polls there Nov. 5. She asked the court to instead order a redo of the race in a special election at a later date.

“To tell one fourth of the qualified, valid voters that their vote is being disregarded because a mistake was made in passing out ballots is not the type of harsh result that (Iowa Code) was intended to impose,” Finke said. “To safeguard the purity of elections, your honor, the matter, we feel, must be sent back to the people.”

Sides spar over definition of ‘misconduct’

Much of the appeal case hinges on whether poll worker mistakes on Election Day amount to “misconduct.”

That’s because Iowa Code Chapter 57 has two subsections mentioning the word, one of which (57.4) gives authority for a contest court to overturn an election result only in cases of “misconduct, fraud, or corruption.”

Petitioners sought to disprove the definition, and by extension, invalidate the previous court’s decision in the school district’s favor.

“If the legislature intended that code provision to apply to non-intentional acts, it would have used the word ‘negligence,” Finke said. “Interpreting ‘misconduct’ … as the district requests amounts to an unwarranted disenfranchisement of the qualified voters of the Ainsworth precinct.”

Finke cited a handful of other clauses in Iowa Code in her arguments, including other parts of Chapter 57 as well as the code chapter 39 and 62, each of which have been evaluated under different criteria by courts, with their own distinct standards of proof.

While she said that Highland’s case didn’t “fit neatly into” any one area of case law, Finke argued in favor of a commonsense gut check based on the reasoning used in other cases.

“I don’t think the election laws, in particular, are designed to forego or inhibit an otherwise completely rational and justifiable challenge to an election,” she said.

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The district, meanwhile, aimed to prove that accidents are considered misconduct, a finding that would affirm the contest court’s application of Chapter 57. It cited a handful of dictionaries, and a pair of Iowa cases which found defendants guilty of misconduct, with no analysis of their intentions.

Tice said the district lacked grounds to challenge the election under other sections of Iowa Code, at least one of which typically requires a list of invalid voters’ names and addresses.

Tice argued the challengers were “trying to squeeze a round peg through a square hole.”

“Petitioners have to do some gymnastics to get past that requirement of a statement presenting the names … rather than go through the neat and clean path the district has presented,” he said. “It’s undisputed that this public measure passes, with or without the Ainsworth precinct. It makes no difference to the result, so the legislature has told us what the court needs to do here.”

Finke argued an ineligible voter list was impossible and unnecessary to provide, since government officials couldn’t access confidential voter data and can already anonymously verify the number of improper ballots. But Highland’s lawyer said the code’s standard set an intentionally high bar, citing other cases were allegedly illegal voters were called to testify about their intentions, as judges rigorously scrutinized their voting eligibility with “laserlike focus.”

He also argued that setting a lower standard would end in a court-clogging avalanche of other election challenges.

“The legislature says, ‘Yes, we are concerned about election integrity, we also know that if we apply this kind of standard, to set aside all elections whenever there’s any kind of irregularity, we’re going to be litigating these all the time,’” Tice said. “So the legislature has made a decision. If we set aside the particular precinct and it doesn’t change the overall result, there’s not an election challenge there, it’s not going to be viable.”

District requests ruling ‘ASAP’

The clock is ticking for Highland to determine whether it will maintain its property tax authority in the coming fiscal year, which begins July 1. And with decision-makers hoping to secure bids for $15 million of construction, education officials say they’re anxious about construction and material prices rising as they wait for the legal battle to wrap up.

To that end, Tice asked District 8A Judge Michael Carpenter to make a ruling on the bond dispute a priority. The judge said he’d put the dispute at “the top of the list.”

It’s a hefty ask, given the case’s content. Parties to the case said repeatedly at the hearing that the matter waded into uncharted legal territory, each mentioning “insufficient” specificity in state codes, and a dearth of case law on the matter with some cited rulings close to a century old, for lack of more recent precedent.

“It’s a very interesting issue,” Judge Carpenter said. “Lots of new laws, old laws, case law from ancient times to parse through.”

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In the meantime, disgruntled taxpayers and anxious school officials will have to wait things out.

Ron Greiner, one of two landowners in the district who filed the appeal, said he left the courtroom on Tuesday feeling favorable about the petition’s chances.

“I am hopeful that the judge considers our arguments, and gives back to the residents of Ainsworth and Oregon Township the right to have our vote count for a bond for which we will be taxed,” he said in a statement to The Union Wednesday morning.

Highland Superintendent Ken Crawford said he was glad to see the case moving along quickly, as decision-makers eye deadlines for $15 million worth of construction planning, and property tax authority that will expire July 1 without a valid bond measure on the books.

“We’re already behind, we’ve missed a year’s window, but we were worried we were going to miss two years of window,” Crawford said. “This is great, that (Judge Carpenter) seems to understand that, and if he moves it to the top of his pile and we get a decision very quickly, that would be great.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com