"By all indications we are going on to New Hampshire victorious." Pete Buttigieg claimed victory in the Iowa caucuses despite no official results being reported.
More on the Iowa caucuses:
The Iowa caucuses that were to give shape to the Democratic presidential race devolved into political embarrassment for the party that left candidates and voters hanging with no results and no springboard into the next round of contests.
An attempt to modernize the arcane Iowa caucus system and make it more transparent melted down with the introduction of new technology and more complex rules. The Iowa Democratic Party was unable to release results from Monday’s caucuses after discovering “inconsistencies” in reporting from some precincts.
By morning, the state Democratic Party said in a statement that it had identified a flaw in the phone application used to report results that failed Monday night.
“We determined with certainty that the underlying data collected via the app was sound,” party chairman Troy Price said in the statement. “While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data. We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system. This issue was identified and fixed.”
That statement came as Chad Wolf, acting secretary of Homeland Security, said in a Fox News interview Tuesday that the federal department had offered to review the Iowa Caucus app, but the agency’s offer was rebuffed.
The Iowa Democratic party indicated results may be released sometime Tuesday but gave no firm timeline.
In the void, several campaigns leaked unverified internal campaign data -- submitted by their own precinct captains -- to claim a strong showing.
Pete Buttigieg effectively delivered his victory speech to supporters, saying, “By all indications we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.” Bernie Sanders’s campaign also released a ranking that showed Sanders at No. 1. Amy Klobuchar’s campaign said she outperformed Joe Biden for fourth place.
None of those results could be confirmed.
The foul-up occurred just days after the closely watched Iowa Poll canceled a Saturday release, saying, in effect, it couldn’t stand behind the results. And the controversy occurred against a backdrop of increasing worry about the credibility of electoral results, following Russian interference in Donald Trump’s election in 2016. It threatened to put a shadow over the final results, whenever they are announced.
Trump on Tuesday morning claimed on Twitter that he was “the only person that can claim a very big victory in Iowa last night.” He called the Democratic results “an unmitigated disaster.”
The Iowa contest is the first in a long cycle of caucuses and primaries that stretches until June -- awarding just 1% of the delegates needed to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination. But Iowa offers outsized momentum to its strong finishers as they head to New Hampshire a week away. Sanders leads the polls there comfortably, followed by Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Buttigieg.
The Iowa Democratic Party said there was no evidence of hacking in the results, merely human error and other inconsistencies that forced the party to resort to hand-counting the votes.
What happened was that the state party deployed a new phone app for precinct chairmen to report results at the same time it deployed a new system for tabulating winners. Both appear to have failed.
Precinct chairmen found it difficult to use the app and instead resorted to calling a hotline. The hotline got so jammed up that they were waiting for 30 minutes or more for someone to answer. Then the party reported there were “inconsistencies” in the count and decided to withhold announcing results until at least Tuesday.
Warren’s campaign manager, Roger Lau, said the delay was concerning and disappointing. “Every second that passes undermines the process a little bit,” he said.
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