Sanders, Buttigieg lead in beleaguered Iowa vote
DES MOINES, Iowa — Iowa caucus glitches related to problems with a new results-reporting system continued into Tuesday, paralyzing the nation’s first Democratic presidential nominating contest.
Under pressure to salvage the caucuses, state Democratic leaders decided Tuesday afternoon to release numbers from a majority of precincts without waiting for the counting process to be completed.
With votes counted in 70% of the precincts, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg grabbed early leads in the field of Democrats.
Sanders had 26% of the popular vote and Buttigieg had 25%, The New York Times reported. Other reports gave Buttigieg a slight edge over Sanders.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., was in third place with 20% of the vote, and former Vice President Joe Biden placed fourth at 13%. In fifth was Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, with about 12%, while entrepreneur Andrew Yang and investor Tom Steyer each received 1% or less.
Monday’s election deba
cle prompted questions about the integrity of Iowa’s caucus system and the technological competence of the Democratic Party, particularly in light of the Russian hacking and disinformation campaign directed at it in 2016.
Iowa Democratic Party officials emphasized that there was no “hack or intrusion” into the voting system. Yet inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results forced them to halt the posting of any outcome until Tuesday — almost 24 hours after voters first began gathering in churches, schools and gymnasiums to haggle over their choices for who would challenge President Donald Trump in November.
It was not until about 10:30 p.m. Monday that the Iowa party finally addressed the day’s problems, issuing a statement as supporters of the various candidates gathered. “This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results,” it said.
Candidates and their supporters were furious at the state party. Iowa Democrats were angry at the national party for insisting on new ways of reporting the voting outcome.
Opponents of Sanders blamed him for the mess, noting that he demanded changes after losing Iowa to Hillary Clinton in 2016. Backers of Sanders accused the party establishment of plotting once more to thwart him.
For many Democrats, it was a worrisome sign of unraveling at a time they hoped to start narrowing their choices to determine who could best take on Trump.
The partial caucus results released Tuesday indicated that no candidate was on track to receive more than about a quarter of the vote, and five candidates received support in the double digits — an indication that the Iowa caucuses were unlikely to be a good barometer for who will ultimately be the Democratic nominee.
The competitive race between Buttigieg, a moderate, and Sanders, a liberal, reflected divisions among Democrats about the direction of the party ahead of the New Hampshire primary Tuesday.
The Iowa Democratic Party did not indicate Tuesday when the complete results would be available.
Troy Price, the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, appeared downcast Tuesday and described the process as “unacceptable” in remarks to reporters. “As chair of the party, I apologize deeply for this,” he said.
Price repeatedly stressed that the data that was released was accurate and said the security of the returns was his “paramount concern.”
If the rest of the Iowa results align with the data published Tuesday, then they spell a setback for Biden, who entered the race as a front-runner last spring.
On Tuesday, Sanders and Buttigieg both attempted to claim an overall victory in the state, based on their internal campaign data, and they were too closely matched in the initial returns to declare a single winner.
In New Hampshire on Tuesday, however, Buttigieg brandished the first wave of data to declare something like victory.
“They’re not complete, but results are in from a majority of precincts and they show our campaign in first place,” he said.
Arriving in New Hampshire on Tuesday afternoon, Sanders struck a balance between lamenting the procedural breakdowns in Iowa and defending the ultimate significance of the vote there. Monday’s caucuses, he acknowledged, were “not a good night for democracy.”
“I think we should all be disappointed in the inability of the party to come up with timely results,” Sanders said. “But we are not casting aspersions on the votes that are being counted.”
Warren, also campaigning in New Hampshire, said Iowa had to “get it together” and criticized the decision to publish fragmentary results.
“I just don’t understand what that means to release half of the data,” Warren said in Keene, N.H. “So I think they ought to get it together and release all of the data.”
In Iowa, Price declined to lay out a timeline for completing the tabulation and releasing the results.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday morning claimed on Twitter that he was “the only person that can claim a very big victory in Iowa last night,” referring to the Republican caucuses where he easily triumphed. He called the Democratic results “an unmitigated disaster.”
Information for this article was contributed by Alexander Burns and Shane Goldmacher of The New York Times; by staff members of The Washington Post; by staff members of the Los Angeles Times; and by Tyler Pager, Jennifer Epstein and Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg News.
For many Democrats, it was a worrisome sign of unraveling at a time they hoped to start narrowing their choices to determine who could best take on Trump.