COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — Pete Buttigieg scored a come-from-behind victory in Council Bluffs’s 18th Precinct by picking up nine votes from minor candidates in the second ballot. But Bernie Sanders’s top supporters in the precinct left upset, claiming their two-vote loss was due to a miscount.
Some voters started the evening unaligned, some voters realigned before the realignment period, and others realigned to nonviable candidates. According to Sanders’s acting precinct captain, some Sanders voters left early, and yet the precinct chairwoman conducted the count primarily by counting heads, using the paper ballots only as a backup.
All the while, the two precinct leaders tried to keep order with poorly amplified microphones, and many caucusgoers didn’t understand the rules, which changed this year. A few elderly voters simply couldn’t hear instructions. It didn’t help that Sanders’s precinct captain failed to show.
Here’s how it went down: In the first ballot, Sanders led big.
Sanders: 23
Buttigieg: 18
Elizabeth Warren: 16
Andrew Yang: 10
Joe Biden: 5
Amy Klobuchar: 4
Tom Steyer: 2
This count was the first sign of trouble. To determine viability, the chairwomen had done an initial count of voters in the room and came up with 80. Simply getting this count was tough in a room that included nonvoters. Biden’s precinct captain, Chuck Hassebrook, for instance, is a Nebraskan, who was not eligible to vote. Two voters brought their children, one of whom looked old enough to vote but was not voting. At one point, two visitors arrived to watch the caucus.
So, when the first alignment (above) produced 78 votes, as opposed to the 80-person head count, that raised quality control issues.
Mark, a retired man in the back of the room, said at the beginning of the night that he was uncommitted. He wanted to see if any of the candidates had plans about the national debt. Five campaigns had speakers — Warren, Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg, and Yang — and none addressed the national debt. In the end, Mark never picked a candidate.
Dan Ziegler, Yang’s precinct spokesman, joined Sanders. Ryan Miller, who originally aligned with Yang but who still has a Sanders sticker on his car, went to Sanders instead of joining his wife, who was with Warren.
Two Biden supporters went to Buttigieg, as did some of the other supporters of minor candidates. After the realignment, here was the count:
Buttigieg: 27
Sanders: 25
Warren: 19
Being the second choice of most of the free agents delivered the room to Buttigieg. He accordingly won five delegates to the county convention, compared to Sanders’s four and Warren’s three.
Will Costello, who became the de facto Sanders precinct captain when the original precinct captain didn’t show, argued to me that Sanders had at least 27 supporters, but that a couple of those who supported Sanders on the first alignment left after filing their ballots. He said the precinct chairmen counted heads on the second alignment instead of counting ballots.
“We counted heads,” the precinct chairman confirmed to me. “The paper ballots are just a backup.”
Those three viable candidates had votes adding up to 71. Three Biden supporters chose not to align with a viable candidate, as did two Yang supporters and one Klobuchar supporter (who “realigned” with Biden, ultimately a meaningless gesture). Kirk Koopmeiners, a Steyer supporter, refused to align with a viable candidate. Add in Mark, and you’re at 79 votes, one short of the official total but one more than the first alignment.
Complicating things, Buttigieg’s precinct captain, Evelyn Zunida, told me that she counted 26 votes for her candidate, one less than the precinct leaders counted.
In this haze, there’s easily enough wiggle room that Buttigieg’s victory over Sanders could have been due to a miscount. Costello, not having training as a precinct captain, didn’t know how to protest it. The precinct chairwomen said media couldn’t look at the actual ballots.
This fog is part of why the Iowa results couldn’t be reliably reported on Monday night. It’s also sure to fuel anger from Sanders supporters, who felt, with reason, that the party establishment rigged the game against them four years ago.
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CORRECTION: This article originally had the wrong last name for Chuck Hassebrook.
