The nation waited with bated breath for the results of the much-hyped Iowa caucuses Monday night, which marked the official start of voting in the Democratic presidential primary. And after a long night of anticipating election returns, we’re all still waiting. The Iowa Democratic Party caused widespread frustration amongst the political class Monday, as the state’s complex caucus system resulted in unprecedented delays in reporting election results. By early Tuesday morning, no election results had yet been officially publicly reported—and candidates were already cutting their losses and moving on to New Hampshire.
Plagued by issues with a reportedly glitchy app for reporting caucus results and a new process that reports three different sets of numbers for each precinct, the Iowa Democratic Party conceded Monday night that it had been plagued with reporting issues that have significantly slowed the vote count. “The integrity of the results is paramount,” IDP Communications Director Mandy McClure said in a statement released after 10:00 PM Eastern time Monday night. “We have experienced a delay in the results due to quality checks and the fact that the IDP is reporting out three data sets for the first time.” McClure then elaborated in a further statement released around 11:30, saying that the IDP had “found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results.” “In addition to the tech systems being used to tabulate results, we are also using photos of results and a paper trail to validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report,” McClure said. “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.”
Chaos was reportedly erupting behind the scenes, as precinct officials spent hours on hold trying to call in their election results. (One caucus secretary reported on CNN that they had been on hold trying to report their results for over an hour—only to have the IDP answer their call, and then hang up on them, live on air.) “The whole system largely broke,” one Iowa Democrat told Politico. Campaigns, too, have been getting visibly annoyed with the lengthy delay, with Joe Biden‘s campaign counsel Dana Remus sending a letter to the IDP expressing concern about the “considerable flaws in tonight’s Iowa Caucus reporting system.” “We believe that the campaigns deserve full explanations and relevant information regarding the methods of quality control you are employing, and an opportunity to respond, before any official results are released,” Remus wrote. The presidential campaigns eventually did have a conference call with the IDP, MSNBC reported after midnight Tuesday—in which the party reportedly hung up on the campaigns as the conversation became heated.
The reporting delay drags out a hotly-anticipated race whose outcome still remains too close to predict, with pre-vote polling suggesting a tight race between Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, albeit with Sanders narrowly in the lead. Based on the very limited data that had been released as of Monday night, those frontrunners still appeared to hold, though the final ranking remains unknown. Senator Amy Klobuchar, who had been polling in fifth place, could also finish stronger than predicted, as Klobuchar’s campaign manager Justin Buoen tweeted after midnight Tuesday that the Minnesota senator is currently “running even or ahead of Vice President Biden.”