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Highland bond dispute appealed once more
Challengers seek to overturn April ruling that authorized school bonds despite polling place mishaps. They may be in for a long wait.
Southeast Iowa Union offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
WASHINGTON — Petitioners have filed to appeal an April 29 District Court ruling that validated the Election Day passage of a Highland School District $15 million bond by 22 votes, even though at least 70 ballots in the race were mistakenly cast by voters who didn’t live in the school district.
The case will now be referred to the Iowa Supreme Court, which can either rule on it, or delegate it to the Iowa Court of Appeals, after a brief-writing process that could itself take up to 90 days, according to parties involved.
Neither side seems to expect a resolution in the near future. Highland Superintendent Ken Crawford said he was frustrated with the move, which is expected to delay $15 million of construction the district had hoped to finance with the narrowly passed bond vote.
“My lawyer says this could be a six-month process before we even hear back from the Iowa Supreme Court, so this is a massive, disappointing and frustrating delay,” Crawford said. “A decision by Christmas would be extremely quick, but I have a feeling we’ll likely get a decision sometime after.”
School district taxes will stay on books, but can’t be spent
Crawford said the school district’s debt service levy would stay on the books while the legal battle plays out, meaning the $2.70 property tax will be collected exactly as it would if the bond had passed unchallenged on Election Day.
The schools will not, however, be able to spend that money until the case concludes, and by extension, can’t afford to take on the bond debt needed for facility improvements around the district.
“We have people trying to stop progress in a community where we’re trying to help it grow,” he said. “They’re stopping progress for our community, for our school district. If you care about our kids, I think this is an easy place to say, ‘Yes, something went sideways, let’s change some laws,’ but let the school progress and do something better for our community.”
Crawford said the legal fight would ultimately raise the district’s costs, not only through sizable legal fees as the case continues to potentially the highest court in the state, but through delays in the project timeline while school officials expect construction costs to rise.
Some advocates, siding with the petitioners against Highland, have called on the district to hold a new special election, ignoring the results of the race in November when at least 70 ineligible voters were accidentally given ballots with the bond question, but whose votes could not be removed from the precinct-wide tally once cast.
While he acknowledged such an approach would likely be faster and, at this point, more affordable, Crawford said there was no legal pathway to do so.
“The law does not dictate that there is another election done,” he said. “The law does not say, ‘if there was election misconduct, or fraud … or something happening at your precinct,’ the law does not dictate that you redo that election. You do the contest court, you do the District Court (and) the law does not say, ‘Do a new election.’ That’s where it was flawed from the very beginning.”
Petitioners stick to their guns
Marcus Fedler, a county supervisor and one of the petitioners challenging the election’s outcome, said the legal battle had cost plaintiffs about $10,000 so far in legal fees.
He and petitioner Ron Greiner have at several points insisted that their challenge wasn’t intended to stop the schools from pursuing the project, but to ensure it did so with elections that fairly represented its constituents’ wishes.
And with Highland’s bond issue passing by a margin of just 22 points, the group argues that at least 70 invalid voters jeopardized that fairness, by potentially altering the outcome.
Teresa Greiner — Ron Greiner’s wife and a recently retired teacher at Highland schools — said she agreed with the need to push the case forward after losing decisions from a contest court and district court.
“Would (the school district) feel the same if the same mistakes were made, and there were 70 additional votes that had been cast, and the bond issue had failed by (22) votes,” she said in an interview on the podcast Southeast Iowa Today with John Bain, where she appeared alongside Fedler earlier this month. “We have nothing against Highland, we like Highland a lot … it’s not the bond itself, it’s the way that it got passed.”
District judge slammed state code in April ruling
While April’s District Court ruling was a win for Highland schools, Judge Michael Carpenter blasted state laws behind the outcome in his opinion.
The basis of that ruling was the means by which petitioners challenged the bond vote’s result. Carpenter said state code was clear that such challenges required the names of every allegedly invalid voter, despite county officials’ testimony that such information was impossible to acquire after their ballots were cast.
“The Court acknowledges that this is a harsh and arguably arbitrary result,” Carpenter wrote. “It is undisputed that illegal votes were cast in numbers sufficient to change the result of the election. The evidence from the auditor conclusively settles that question in the petitioners’ favor, and the testimony of the individual voters is simply not necessary to carry that point … but without compliance with (Iowa Code) the petitioners cannot bring a contest.”
The ruling cited an array case law, and statutory changes as recent as 2002.
In the months since its release, however, the state has quietly changed a handful of the procedures to challenge elections.
Iowa House File 928, signed by Gov. Kim Reynolds on June 2, repealed the legal language establishing “contest courts,“ one of which ruled on Highland’s bond dispute earlier this year. The new state code replaces the process with a more formalized proceeding overseen by appointees of the state supreme court’s chief justice. The law also reformed election recount procedures for public measures, among other things.
The reforms did not alter Iowa’s requirement that election challengers provide a name for every allegedly invalid voter, and it’s unclear if or how the changes may impact evaluations of the law in the higher courts. Judge Carpenter’s ruling in April was based heavily on an extrapolation of the legislature’s intent when it established state codes governing such challenges.
“The scheme provided by the legislature requires the parties to list the names of the voters who have cast illegal votes,” he wrote. “Whether, right, wrong or indifferent, this is the scheme the legislature chose.”
Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com
