An election debacle unfolded Monday night as the Iowa Democratic Party failed to release the results of the state’s presidential caucuses, saying it had found “inconsistencies in the reporting” as the nation awaited the outcome of the first-in-the-nation nominating contest, The Wall Street Journal reports.
“In addition to the tech systems being used to tabulate results, we are also using photos of results and a paper trail to validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report,” Mandy McClure, the state party’s communications director, said in a statement.
She said a mobile app used to record and report results from each caucus site “did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”
The delay has temporarily deprived the winner of the burst of media attention and momentum that typically comes from success in Iowa. It also may have given any candidates who performed poorly a free pass, the Journal adds.
During an early Tuesday conference call with the campaigns, state party officials said they weren’t willing to provide details on any results they had collected, according to a person familiar with the call. The officials said they expected to release results later Tuesday but didn’t specify a time, the person said.
The campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden said in a letter to the state party that “acute failures are occurring statewide” in the party’s reporting system. “We believe that the campaigns deserve full explanations and relevant information regarding the methods of quality control you are employing, and an opportunity to respond, before any official results are released,” wrote Dana Remus, general counsel for Biden’s campaign.
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