DES MOINES, Iowa — The Iowa caucus counting fiasco is doing little to quell concerns that the 2020 Democratic nominating process won’t be “rigged” against Bernie Sanders, the way his supporters say it was in 2016.
The Iowa Democratic Party early Tuesday evening began releasing partial caucus results nearly 24 hours after the full batch was supposed to come out, helping set the narrative for the primary race going forward. The partial results showed Vermont Sen. Sanders narrowly behind former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in delegates, with 62% of precincts counted.
That stood in contrast to partial results released Monday night by the Sanders campaign, which showed him leading. But the campaign felt particularly frustrated as Buttigieg preemptively declared himself the caucus winner early Tuesday.
Meanwhile, their most prominent rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, was also able to leave the state without having to face a poor finish publicly.
Despite its last-minute maneuvers, the Sanders campaign felt snubbed. After setting expectations high internally and for supporters, it would be unable to capitalize on any caucus success with national news media laser-focused on Iowa and ready to shower attention on high performers.
On a call with the Iowa Democratic Party late Monday, Sanders senior adviser Jeff Weaver ripped state officials, calling their excuses “bogus” and saying that “the whole process has been a fraud for 100 years.”
“This was not a good night for democracy,” Sanders told reporters on a plane to New Hampshire on Tuesday.
Public statements from the state party, which remained vague and lacked a timetable, did little to alleviate any frustration.
It’s a shocking surprise for a process that was meant to be more transparent and accessible to local Democrats. Previously, many parents, shift workers, people with disabilities, and those not in the state for the caucuses found it too expensive or time-consuming to participate in a chaotic hours-long event in previous election cycles.
The state party added “satellite” caucus sites across the globe. It mandated each person’s support be reported on a piece of paper. It tried to expedite the lively realignment phase to lock in the vote for “viable” candidates over 15% on the first alignment and only allowed caucusgoers one opportunity to switch support before final alignment so that people could go home earlier rather than staying late into the night.
Some of the changes intended to make the process easier actually made vote and delegate totals more difficult to report for some precinct captains.
CNN reported that caucus chairs in multiple precincts had difficulty doing the math to calculate final delegate counts, sometimes neglecting to count the “locked in” votes for people who had left the room after the first alignment in their final alignment results.
The Democratic National Committee also encouraged state parties to let state governments run their nominating contests for the party’s presidential nomination. Iowa’s results represented a perfect explanation why.
An app that the Iowa party used for caucus night, intended to transmit results from caucus sites to headquarters, was found to have coding glitches that gave inconsistent results, causing the party to hold off on publishing any results at all until it could verify them.
Because the party is for the first time this year reporting “raw vote” first and final alignment totals, another change made in part to due transparency concerns, correcting the results took longer than they might have otherwise.
In a cruel irony, the changes meant to stave off frustration from Sanders’s base only exasperated tensions within the Democratic Party.
Following a narrow loss to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016, the Sanders’s campaign initiated a review of the Iowa caucuses. Sanders was joined by local media, including the Des Moines Register, which formally called for the results to be audited.
“Too many accounts have arisen of inconsistent counts, untrained and overwhelmed volunteers, confused voters, cramped precinct locations, a lack of voter registration forms and other problems,” the paper wrote at the time. “Too many of us, including members of the Register editorial board who were observing caucuses, saw opportunities for error amid Monday night’s chaos.”
Despite his complaints, the results had virtually no impact on Sanders’s performance in the New Hampshire primary. He walked away from the state with a win over Clinton by more than 22%.
Luckily for Sanders, one of the reforms implemented was a requirement to record votes in writing. The question is whether the Vermont senator will see any tangible bump from the results after changes to the process delayed results.
