The results of Iowa’s tumultuous, glitch-laden Democratic caucus are finally in, the majority, anyway.
As of 5 p.m. Tuesday, only 62 percent of the caucus locations had been tallied, leaving plenty of questions in a tight race. The Iowa Democratic Party does not have a timeline as to when the rest of the results will be reported, though more are expected to trickle in.
Former Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg currently has a narrow lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders, sitting at 26.9 percent of delegates as of 5 p.m. Tuesday. Sanders has wrangled 25.1 percent, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren came in third with 18.3 percent.
Former Vice President Joe Biden is in fourth place at 15.6 percent, followed by Amy Klobuchar at 12.6 percent and Andrew Yang at 1 percent.
With the caucus results in disarray and no clear winner 24 hours after the vote, many political pundits are declaring President Donald Trump as the spiritual winner of the Iowa Democratic Caucus.
Iowa’s first-in-the-nation presidential contest had been revamped this year to try to avoid problems that arose in the 2016 caucuses, which were also plagued by late reporting and questions of whether the popular vote winner ended up winning the state delegate equivalents.
In 2012, Iowa’s Republican party reported Mitt Romney as the winner in a close race with Rick Santorum, only to declare Santorum the winner a few weeks later.
Iowa Democratic Party officials said this year’s problems were not caused by outside interference. Rather, they were the result of a new reporting process involving a smart-phone app that caucus chairs were supposed to use to upload results. A coding glitch prevented many of the precinct captains from reporting, which caused a backup telephone reporting system to be overloaded, leaving some on hold for more than two hours.
Democratic County Co-Chairman Tom Courtney was one of them. After waiting for nearly an hour to get through to the state party Monday night, Courtney went home with the results unreported. So did many precinct captains.
“We used to be in and out of there in a heartbeat,” said Courtney, who captained the precinct that voted at Burlington High School. “I think it worked better when we called the results in.”
Courtney said the app didn’t work properly before caucus night, and he had his doubts going into Monday. He was even more disappointed by the low voter turnout at his precinct, which was less than half of what the Iowa Democratic Party said he should be expecting.
“I was really surprised,” he said.
The app blamed for Iowa’s stalled Democratic caucus results was put together by an alum of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Gerard Niemira, CEO of Shadow Inc. — the company tapped by the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) to build an app for reporting the results of the crucial, first-in-the-nation caucus — served as director of the product on Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Shadow’s role in building the app was not publicly known before the failed rollout.
Precinct chairs across the state experienced problems downloading or logging into the app, one of the ways they were supposed to be able to send the results from their smaller, individual caucuses to the IDP, Bloomberg News reported.
“The changes that were made to the caucus this year were in response to criticism from [Sen. Bernie] Sanders’ campaign in 2016,” Karen Kedrowski, director of the Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University and an expert on caucus history, told The New York Post of the app’s commissioning and rollout.
The app, Kedrowski said, was supposed to be one of the multiple fixes made to the caucus process after the Sanders campaign challenged certain procedures from 2016 as unfair.
“You could log in, the app would be secure, and you could report your results without having to wait on the phone to submit,” she said of what the app would’ve promised to do.
Kedrowski added that along with the app’s failed rollout, “sheer incompetence [from the state] added to the mess.”
The New York Post contributed to this article.
Photo by Anthony Dewitt
Supporters of former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg chat Monday evening before the start of the Burlington Precinct 6 caucus at Grimes Elementary School in Burlington. Buttigieg currently has a narrow lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders, sitting at 26.9 percent as of 5 p.m. Tuesday.