Republican candidate for the 8th U.S. Congressional District Stewart Mills III Tuesday formally requested a discretionary recount of the votes originally tallied on Election Day last month.
Minnesota election law says only elections with a margin of less than 0.25 percent can be funded by taxpayer dollars. However, the losing candidate may request a discretionary recount if the margin is larger than that threshold, if their own campaign pays for it.
Unofficial results had Mills behind Democratic incumbent Rick Nolan by about a 0.56 percent margin, or slightly more than 2,000 votes.
"The fact that we're half a point apart, it would be negligent of me not to pursue a recount," Mills said Tuesday.
Mills said the campaign formally asked for a recount following Tuesday's meeting of the State Canvassing Board, which verifies election results. County governments across the 8th District will begin recounting the votes in staggered start dates that vary from Dec. 5-7. In Crow Wing County, the recount will start 9 a.m. Monday at the land services building.
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In interviews with various media outlets after news broke late Monday about the recount, Mills said he wasn't trying to question the integrity of the state's election system. He also didn't want to sensationalize the move or disrespect Nolan, he said.
"Hopefully it doesn't take on a life of its own and become a source of controversy," Mills said. "But, the good thing is, is that it's going to happen so quickly that if controversy does present itself, there won't be enough time for it to get traction, or for things to get ugly or personal."
A hand recount would simply pick up the anomalies the initial voting machine count might have missed, Mills said. It would be able to take into account ballots people marked in a way the machine couldn't read, such as a checkmark in the oval rather than filling it in, or writing in Mills' name rather than filling in his oval.
"Those votes should count as much as any other vote, and that is one of the things that a hand recount will rectify," he said.
Some voting statistics that raised Mills' eyebrows included about 17,700 people who voted for Donald Trump but didn't vote for him, and the more than 40,000 people who voted for Nolan but not for Hillary Clinton.
"It was a very unusual year, to say the least," Mills said.
Vote audits initiated since the 2016 election have indicated changing vote totals when officials run the numbers again, Mills said.
Mills said he hoped the recount cost wouldn't be as high as six figures, but the Minnesota Secretary of State's office Wednesday announced its estimate for the cost of the recount totaled $102,053.
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Although the campaign won't turn away money from contributors who want to donate toward the recount effort, Mills said, they won't actively solicit donations.
However, Nolan campaign manager Joe Radinovich said their campaign is actively fundraising. Their costs will also run about $100,000, Radinovich said. The money goes toward things like putting staff back on the payroll, hiring lawyers and organizing volunteers to observe the counting. The state puts the public funding threshold at .25 percent because election results with that small margin might change-but even then it's unlikely, Radinovich said. He said the same vote audits that Mills mentioned resulted in two votes changing, one for Mills and one for Nolan.
In addition, Mills gained 16 votes from Nolan from the time of the election to the county-level canvassing board meetings.
"I suspect that that's the most significant movement at any one time that he's going to see," Radinovich said. "We might see 20 votes change one way, 20 votes change the other way during this process but I don't suspect we'll see much more than that."
Mills put about $2 million of his own money into the campaign. He said the decision to pay for the recount wasn't just about his previous personal investment into the campaign, instead it was mainly about the small margin between him and Nolan, as well as the investment of his campaign workers and volunteers in the effort. He owed it to them and to the voters to make sure the election result was true, he said.
"What we're trying to do is, do this as quickly and quietly as possible so the will of the voters can be discerned," Mills said. "Once it is discerned, we're fully prepared to accept any legitimate outcome."
