’20 Democratic caucus results delayed in Iowa
Some blame new technology as one official calls it a ‘mess’
DES MOINES, Iowa — The Iowa Democratic Party said Monday night that results from the state’s firstin-the-nation caucus were delayed indefinitely due to a “reporting issue” and not because of a “hack or an intrusion.”
Communications director Mandy McClure said the party “found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results,” and was using photos and a paper trail to “validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report.”
The problem was apparently new technology sent to precinct chairs. The party was using a mobile app to calculate, tabulate and report three sets of caucus results: a tally of caucusgoers’ initial candidate preference; vote totals from the “final alignment” after supporters of lower-ranking candidates were able to make a second choice, and the total number of “state delegate equivalents” each candidate receives.
However, Iowa Democratic Party officials had said they would not send the app to precinct chairs until just before the caucuses in hopes
of preventing any election interference. Lawrence Norden, an elections expert with The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, said that was akin to a major retailer giving its employees new cash registers on Black Friday.
“To roll out a new technology without really testing it … is a high-stakes decision which I think is proving to be problematic today,” Norden said Monday night.
Just hours before the beginning of the contest, the state party’s headquarters received multiple calls from precinct chairs around the state reporting problems with the new app. The Iowa Democratic Party at the time said nearly all of the calls were related to user-error problems, such as precincts in areas with bad cellphone service having problems downloading or logging on to the app, or others simply asking about the app’s functionality.
Des Moines County Democratic Chair Tom Courtney, however, said the app itself was at fault, calling it “a mess.”
As a result of the problems, Courtney said, precinct leaders were using the traditional method of reporting caucus results by phoning them in to the state party headquarters. However, the headquarters was too busy to answer their calls in some cases.
Shawn Sebastian, the caucus secretary for Story County Precinct 1-1, told The Washington Post that “the app just straight-up wasn’t working.” He later spent more than an hour on hold trying to report his precinct results.
In Dubuque, results for one precinct were delayed for more than an hour because caucus officials were having trouble reporting official numbers through the app they were supposed to use. They kept getting an error while trying to send numbers.
Bruce Koeppl, a precinct captain for former Vice President Joe Biden, said he was frustrated by the results.
“As an Iowa Democrat, it’s very disappointing,” he said. “I think there will be questions about our status. More questions, there really are questions about [our place] already. … This looks very bad. They’ve had a long time to prepare for this.”
The confusion of the different methods of tabulating and reporting the votes was blamed for the delays. It was not immediately clear late Monday how long it would take the state party to produce results.
NEW HAMPSHIRE NEXT
The Democratic hopefuls still spoke on Monday night, addressing the delays while mostly looking ahead to New Hampshire, which holds the nation’s first primary next week.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota was the first Democratic presidential candidate to address the delayed caucus results, saying, “We know one thing: We are punching above our weight.”
The senator built her campaign around a strong performance in Iowa and pledged to continue.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Monday that the results of the Iowa caucus are “too close to call,” using her time to criticize President Donald Trump.
“We don’t know all the results tonight, but tonight has already shown that Americans have a hunger for big structural change,” she told a crowd of several hundred people in downtown Des Moines.
Biden declared success, whatever the vote.
“We feel good about where we are, so it’s on to New Hampshire,” Biden said Monday night, adding that he’d “walk out of here with our share of delegates.”
The caucuses are just the first in a primary season that will span all 50 states and several U.S. territories, ending at the party’s national convention in mid-July.
But the uncertainty about the results, and intraparty resentment, hung over Monday’s election, raising fears of a long and divisive primary fight in the months ahead.
One unsurprising development: Trump won the Republican caucus, a largely symbolic victory given that he faced no significant opposition.
GOP TWEET: IT’S ‘RIGGED’
Pre-caucus polls had suggested that Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., might have a narrow lead, but other polls suggested Warren, Biden or former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg could score a victory.
Outsider candidates, including entrepreneur Andrew Yang, billionaire activist Tom Steyer and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, could be factors.
Sanders’ projected lead, and news of the delay in the Iowa results, caused some Republicans to suggest that the contest was “rigged” against Sanders.
Trump campaign officials and a pro-Trump super political action committee tweeted on Monday night, with no evidence, that Democratic Party officials were purposefully withholding the results to hurt Sanders’ chances.
“Quality control = rigged?” tweeted Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale.
“JUST IN: The DNC rigged the primary for Hillary Clinton again,” tweeted America First Action, a proTrump super PAC.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on whether the tweets violated its policies.
CANDIDATES UPBEAT
Three senators in the field left Iowa late Sunday to return to the U.S. Capitol for Trump’s impeachment trial, but did what they could to keep their campaigns going from Washington.
While Warren held her telephone town hall, Klobuchar’s husband and daughter appeared at a canvass launch in Des Moines.
In suburban Des Moines, Buttigieg delivered about 100 volunteers a last shot of encouragement before they stepped out into the chill to knock on doors for him around midday Monday.
“We are exactly where we need to be to astonish the political world,” he said, igniting cheers for the 38-year-old former midsize-city mayor, who was an asterisk a year ago and is now among the top candidates.
Meanwhile, Biden and his wife, Jill, delivered pizza Monday to a few dozen volunteers working the phones at his south Des Moines field office.
“I feel good,” he said. Iowa offers just a tiny percentage of the delegates needed to win the nomination but plays an outsize role in culling primary fields. A poor showing in Iowa could cause a front-runner’s fundraising to slow and support in later states to dwindle, while a strong result can give a candidate much-needed momentum.
The past several Democrats who won the Iowa caucuses went on to clinch the party’s nomination. A notable exception was Bill Clinton in 1992, though his competition that year included Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who won about 76% of the vote.
The 2020 fight has played out over myriad distractions, particularly congressional Democrats’ push to impeach Trump, which has often overshadowed the primary and effectively pinned several leading candidates to Washington at the pinnacle of the early campaign season.
Meanwhile, billionaire Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, is running a parallel campaign that ignores Iowa as he prepares to pounce on any perceived weaknesses in the field come March.
New party rules may give more than one candidate an opportunity to claim victory in Iowa, even if they aren’t the official winner.
Because the Iowa Democratic Party planned to tally three sets of results, there was no guarantee that all three will show the same winner.
The Associated Press will declare a winner based on the number of state delegates each candidate wins, which has been the traditional standard.
Information for this article was contributed by Steve Peoples, Thomas Beaumont, Alexandra Jaffe and staff members of The Associated Press; by Nick Corasaniti and Sheera Frenkel of The New York Times; and by Amy B Wang, Holly Bailey, Michelle Ye Hee Lee,Tony Romm, Jacqueline Alemany and Sean Sullivan of The Washington Post.