PLEASANT VALLEY, Iowa — The recount board in the Pleasant Valley School Board race violated state recount procedures, according to the Iowa Secretary of State's office.
According to an email News 8 received, the secretary of state has sent a "technical infraction" to the board, which conducted a re-canvass of the District #6 board member race from November's city-school election. A re-canvass is a second verification of the voting count.
In the original Nov. 7 election, current District #6 Board Member Jameson Smith won with 256 votes — just six more than incumbent Tracy Rivera's 250 votes. After Rivera requested a recount, a three-member board completed a re-canvass of the District #6 election results in early December and revealed Rivera to have tied Smith. That board is who received the infraction.
The Scott County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to reject the results of the re-canvass due to concerns over how it was conducted. As a result, Rivera lost the position to Smith.
At least two members of the Board of Supervisors said they received copies of emails from the team who did the re-canvass in which at least one member said some ballots were not marked correctly but still counted. Despite being the incumbent, Tracey Rivera had to be voted as a write-in option on the ballot. One email explained that on some ballots, the bubble next to the write-in line was not filled in properly, but Rivera's name was written correctly, and that some of these such ballots were counted anyway.
Right before the new year, Rivera filed a lawsuit against the Scott County Board of Supervisors. Court documents allege that the board violated Iowa state law and stripped Rivera of an equal opportunity to serve on the Pleasant Valley School Board. The secretary of state's office has not issued an infraction to the Board of Supervisors, saying they "will let the legal process take its course," according to the email. Rivera joined the school board in Oct. 2022 to fill a vacant seat until the election.
Iowa Code 39A.6(3)(a) gives the Secretary of State the ability to impose a fine with a technical infraction only if the violator is a county commissioner, which the recount board was not.