There won’t Democratic caucus result tonight — not from Des Moines County and not from the rest of Iowa.
Tom Courtney, Des Moines County Democratic co-chairman, said he tried for about an hour to phone in the results of his voting precinct at Burlington High School.
He couldn’t get through to anyone at the state’s central committee. Other Iowa county chairs who were able to get their results to the committee reported being on hold for nearly an hour.
Rather than sit inside an empty cafeteria by himself Monday night, Courtney went home. During a live interview with National Public Radio shortly before 10 p.m., after just arriving home, Courtney said he would call the results into the committee in the morning.
“Iowans aren’t going to stay up too late to see the results,” he said.
Caucus results would have normally been reported well before 10 p.m., but a conflagration of complications, including a glitchy new phone app and a new voting rules system, threw the normally fluid selection process into chaos.
“They told us this (app) would make things work better than ever. Being older, I had my doubts,” Courtney said.
Courtney said he was more astonished by the low voter turnout. The state Democratic party told him to expect about 250 voters at BHS Monday night but only 118 voters showed up.
“I was very disappointed in the turnout,” he said.
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign called the Iowa Democratic Party’s caucus voting process flawed in an official letter to the organization Monday night.
By 11 p.m., most of the candidates have publicly addressed their anxious supporters, though none had results to report.