BY AMANDA BECKER, JOSEPH AX AND GINGER GIBSON
Pete Buttigieg led in Iowa’s initial caucus results with 62% of precincts reporting, with U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in second and third place and former Vice President Joe Biden trailing in fourth, the Iowa Democratic Party reported on Tuesday.
Buttigieg had 26.9% of state delegate equivalents, Sanders had 25.1%, Warren had 18.3% and Biden had 15.6%, according to CNN estimates. Tabulation of Iowa’s Monday caucus results continues after technology-related delays.
Iowa’s Democrats promised to begin to release long-delayed results on Tuesday afternoon from the party’s chaotic first voting in its process of picking a candidate to face Republican Donald Trump in November’s U.S. presidential election.
Troy Price, the party’s state chairman, said more than 50% of results from the Iowa caucuses would be released at 5 p.m. ET (2200 GMT), 21 hours after voters gathered Monday night to choose a Democratic candidate in schools and community centers around the state.
Officials blamed inconsistencies related to a new mobile app used for vote counting for the highly unusual delay in releasing results in the state that traditionally kicks off a U.S. presidential election year.
The delay enraged Iowa Democrats worried that the confusion would play into Trump’s hands and prompted some Democratic candidates’ campaigns to question whether the results would be legitimate.
It was a clumsy start to 2020 voting, after a tumultuous presidential campaign four years ago that produced a surprise winner in Trump and led to a two-year federal investigation into election interference by Russia.
“Every second that passes undermines the process a little bit,” said Roger Lau, campaign manager for U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Republicans asked how Democrats could run the country if they could not conduct a caucus while Trump mocked the Democrats on Twitter, calling the delay an “unmitigated disaster.”
Campaign aides for former Vice President Joe Biden cited gross failures in the caucuses. “We have real concerns about the integrity of the process,” Biden spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield told CNN on Tuesday.
“It looks like a disorganized mess,” said Jessica Leonard, 41, who runs a food truck in Winterset, Iowa.
She said she normally votes Democratic but that she was so furious by the “fiasco” that she might vote for Trump in the Nov. 3 election. “It’s like they are setting up Trump to win again. It’s just a huge embarrassment.”
After more than a year of campaigning and more than $800 million in spending, the results in Iowa had been expected to provide some answers for Democrats desperately trying to figure out how to beat the businessman-turned-president.
Instead, Democratic candidates hurtled toward New Hampshire’s Feb. 11 primary with no clear answers.
“Iowa was a disaster for Iowa. It became a false-start that now makes New Hampshire the key early contest and changes some of the math on who emerges as the top candidate,” said University of New Haven professor Matthew Schmidt.
The Nevada Democratic Party said that for its Feb. 22 presidential caucuses it will not be using the same app or vendor that led to delayed reporting of Iowa’s results.
Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, expressed frustration with the delayed results after having told a late-night rally that there were indications he had been “victorious.”
Buttigieg and front-runner Sanders released their campaigns’ own count of the Iowa vote which showed them having done well.
Trump took a swipe at the Democrats, 11 of whom are
contenders in the state-by-state battle to face him in November.
“Nothing works, just like they ran the Country,” he wrote on Twitter.
APP CODING PROBLEM
Price, the Iowa Democratic chairman, said the app was recording data accurately but only partial data. The coding problem was fixed and state officials are verifying the data from the app with required paper documentation, he said.
Some local officials reported having trouble using the mobile app to report results from 1,600 schools, community centers and other locations. But when they turned to the traditional method – calling results in by telephone – they were put on hold and could not get through.
“We had people with their phones on speaker who were stuck on hold from 9 through at least 11,” said Bret Nilles, the Democratic Party chairman in Linn County. He said he had no problems recording results through the app.
Iowa Democrats had been keen to be more transparent in this year’s caucuses after complaints from Sanders about the 2016 caucus when he and rival Hillary Clinton earned roughly the same number of delegates who go on to choose the party’s presidential nominee. He had asked the party for an audit and additional transparency.
This year, the state party had tried to release multiple data sets from Monday’s caucuses instead of only the number of delegates each candidate earned.
Some Democrats have long complained that the largely white farm state has an outsized role in determining the party’s presidential nominee.
NO FOUL PLAY
While Republicans were quick to pounce on the problems, their party has its own history of presidential election chaos in Iowa. On the night of the party’s 2012 caucuses, Mitt Romney was declared to have won by only eight votes. But two weeks later, the party announced that Rick Santorum had actually won by 34 votes. Romney went on to be the nominee.
Iowa Democratic officials said there was no indication the mobile app was hacked.
U.S. intelligence agencies say Moscow meddled in the 2016 election with a campaign of email hacking and online propaganda aimed at sowing discord in the United States, hurting Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and helping Trump.
Even without the technology problems, the distinct Iowa caucuses can be difficult to understand.
At the caucus sites in Iowa, voters had gathered in groups by candidate preference in a public display of support. If a candidate did not attract 15% of voters, the total needed to be considered viable, that candidates’ supporters were released to back another contender, leading to a further round.
