The Iowa Democratic Party releases preliminary national delegate counts

The Iowa Democratic Party has completed its review of caucus results from 95 precincts called into question by Democratic presidential candidates, and has made a preliminary announcement of how many national delegates each candidate can expect.

Should these results be made final, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Buttigieg would receive 14 of 41 delegates, Sen. Bernie Sanders would receive 12, Sen. Elizabeth Warren would get eight, former Vice President Joe Biden would be awarded six, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar would get one.

Again, these numbers are preliminary. Candidates have until 1 pm ET on Monday to challenge them, and to request a formal recount.

The review that concluded Sunday was requested by the Warren, Buttigieg, and Sanders campaigns over concerns of inconsistencies between the reported results and official records. It did not involve recounting any results.

According to emails reviewed by the New York Times’s Trip Gabriel, an Iowa Democratic Party lawyer said the party could not change the voting records tallied on caucus worksheets even if blatant mistakes were found in the review, because doing so would violate election law. The lawyer said the only way to correct mistakes — other than those made in the reporting of the worksheets — would be a formal recount.

Such a recount would require checking individual voter “preference cards” — cards on which caucus-goers recorded who they were caucusing for — but not all of those cards are believed to be accounted for.

These preliminary delegate totals come nearly a week after the caucuses themselves, and ahead of their release, a number of candidates and party officials expressed frustration with how the process has unfolded.

“They screwed it up badly is what the Iowa Democratic Party did,” Sanders said on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning, adding later, “The incompetence there in Iowa was just extraordinary.”

Wednesday, Buttigieg’s campaign said the Iowa Democratic Party “did the right thing” in delaying results to ensure they’re accurate, but was quick to claim victory heading into the New Hampshire primary. The Iowa caucuses “represent an astonishing victory for our movement,” he said on Tuesday.

While the caucuses are run by the Iowa Democratic Party, Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Tom Perez also expressed his frustration with state leaders Sunday, and suggested Iowa’s struggles may change how the DNC conducts elections going forward.

“I’m frustrated, I’m mad as hell, everybody is,” Perez said told CNN Sunday. “I think what we’re going to do at the end of this cycle is have a further conversation about whether or not state parties should be running elections.”

State party chair Troy Price has agreed “an independent investigation of what happened is necessary” — but first, the party needs to ensure no campaign will challenge its results and formally declare a winner.

The Iowa caucuses are usually very important to presidential primaries, like it or not. Most Democratic presidential nominees in the past 40 years began their rise by winning the Iowa caucuses. The contest has a huge effect on a candidate’s chances going into all of the primaries that follow, increasing media coverage and oftentimes fueling donor support, which can snowball into further popularity.

That’s one reason why the unusual delay in Iowa results is a major kick in the gut for Democrats seeking to fire up voters.

So why did this happen? It comes down to a potent mix of technical problems and human error.

For the first time, precincts were tasked with reporting multiple results: the actual number of votes each candidate received in both the first and second rounds of caucusing and the amount of state delegates each candidate was to receive based on those second-round vote totals. Those results were be reported through a new smartphone app — also a first. People had trouble using the app, and phone lines used to call in results as a backup option were jammed for hours — in part because of trolling efforts.

The party also instituted some rules changes around how caucus-goers were allowed to switch their support in an attempt to streamline the process and to make it less confusing.

However, all of these changes introduced more opportunity for human error.

The Iowa Democratic Party said when results started coming in, “it became clear that there were inconsistencies with the reports.” Iowa Democratic Party communications director Mandy McClure said afterward that the party could resolve these inconsistencies, but needed time to review photos of the results and “a paper trail” to do so, noting that there was no malicious intent that affected totals: “This is not a hack or an intrusion.”

That review took time, and led to results being released in batches over much of last week.

And that led to Perez called upon the state party to immediately begin “recanvassing” — or auditing the results for accuracy days after they were first expected to be released in full. “Enough is enough,” he wrote Thursday on Twitter.

The chaos has put some extra oomph behind calls to strip Iowa of its first in the nation status; even before the snafu, those in favor of changing state voting order argued Iowa doesn’t represent the diversity of the US and uses an inaccessible voting system.

Perez said Sunday those calls for change will be taken seriously — just not yet: “That’s a conversation that will absolutely happen after the election cycle,” he said on State of the Union.

If new concerns should emerge following this latest review, it remains to be seen whether any candidates will request a formal recount. And even if a campaign were to request a recount, how much of a difference it could make for any particular candidate is not clear.

Buttigieg and Sanders, the candidates fighting over first place, have each already declared victory. And most contenders — including those presidential candidates still grumbling over the opaque results — have already turned their attention to New Hampshire, whose citizens have their primary on February 11.