The Iowa Democratic Party’s woes in reporting results from its presidential nominating caucuses are multiplying, with an analysis of official results finding inconsistencies in more than 100 precincts.
The New York Times found instances where vote tallies did not add up, where state delegate equivalents (the traditional measure used to determine the winner) were awarded incorrectly, or where raw results should not be possible.
It’s the latest headache for Iowa Democrats, who ran Monday’s caucuses and still have not reported an official winner.
Changes to caucus rules this year included locking in support on the first alignment for candidates who met a 15% viability threshold, meaning that it should be impossible for candidates who met 15% on the first alignment to have a smaller number of votes on the final alignment. The analysis found at least 10 instances where a candidate viable on the first alignment lost support on the final alignment, which would not be possible under correctly-followed caucus procedures.
In at least 70 precincts, there are more votes recorded for the final alignment than on the first alignment, which should also not be possible since no more caucusgoers are allowed to join a precinct after the start time at 7 p.m.
Candidates who won more votes received fewer state delegate equivalents in at least 15 precinct sites, and a few were awarded more state delegate equivalents than they were allotted.
Inconsistencies identified in the analysis are only the latest snafu in the Iowa results.
A coding glitch in an app meant to quickly transmit results from the precinct sites to party headquarters on Monday night delayed the first results for a day, derailing candidate victory parties and sending them all to New Hampshire uncertain of the ultimate winner. That caused the state party to verify results manually, but a backup phone line meant to be used to report results had long hold times and was flooded with calls from supporters of President Trump, causing further delays. Some results are being sent by snail mail.
As official tallies slowly trickled in, one batch of results reported Wednesday incorrectly awarded support to long-shot candidates, businessman Tom Steyer and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, but was quickly corrected. The other inconsistencies remain.
Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Tom Price said Tuesday that the app problems “did not impact the ability of precinct chairs to report data accurately.” But problems identified by the New York Times suggest that those running the more than 1,600 caucus sites had difficulty following the new rules or performing the “caucus math” to determine delegate allocation.
The problems would not have been recognized without a new transparency rule — pushed by supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, following his close loss to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Iowa caucuses — where the Iowa Democratic Party is reporting raw vote totals in the precincts for first and final alignment. In previous years, only the state delegate equivalent figure was reported.
Current official results with 96% of precincts reporting, with the inconsistencies, reveal a razor-thin race with former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg with 26.2% of state delegate equivalents and Sanders with 26.1%. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden are in third and fourth place with 18.2% and 15.8%, respectively.
