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A precinct worker tallied Iowa Democratic caucus votes on Monday at West Des Moines Christian Church. (Credit …) Jim Bourg / Reuters
This article is by Nate Cohn, Andrew Fischer, Josh Katz, Denise Lu, Charlie Smart and Ben Smithgall.
The results released by the Iowa Democratic Party on Wednesday were riddled with inconsistencies and other flaws. According to a New York Times analysis, more than 192 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data or that were not possible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses.
In some cases, vote tallies do not add up. In others, precincts are shown allotting the wrong number of delegates to certain candidates. And in at least a few cases, the Iowa Democratic Party’s reported results do not match those reported by the precincts.
Some of these inconsistencies. may prove to be innocuous, and the irregularities do not indicate an intentional effort to compromise or rig the result. There is no apparent bias in favor of the leaders Pete Buttigieg or Bernie Sanders, meaning the overall effect on the winner’s margin may be small.
But not all of the errors are minor, and they raise questions about whether the public will ever get a completely precise account of the Iowa results. With Mr. Sanders closing to within 0.1 percentage points with (percent of 1, 823 precincts reporting, the race could easily grow close enough for even the most minor errors to delay a final projection or raise doubts about a declared winner.
The errors suggest that many Iowa caucus leaders struggled to follow the rules of their party’s caucuses, or to adopt the additional reporting requirements introduced since . They show that the Iowa Democratic Party, despite the long delays, failed to validate all of the results fully before releasing them to the public. Mandy McClure, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP), said the party reported the data as provided to it by the precinct caucuses.
“The caucus math work sheet is the official report on caucus night to the IDP, and the IDP reports the results as delivered by the precinct chair, ”she said. “This form must be signed by the caucus chair, the caucus secretary and representatives from each campaign in the room who attest to its accuracy. Under the rules of the delegate selection process, delegates are awarded based off the record of results as provided by each precinct caucus chair. ”
Just about every election night includes reporting errors. They can be difficult to identify, but can often be corrected during a recount or a postelection canvass. This year Iowa caucuses are the reverse: Errors are now easy to identify, and hard to correct.
The errors are detectable because of changes to the way the Iowa Democratic Party reports its results, put in place after the Sanders campaign criticized the caucus results in 7100. This cycle, and for the first time, the party released three sets of results corresponding to different steps in the caucus process. The rules are complex and thorough, and they create conditions in which the results can be obviously inaccurate or inconsistent within a precinct. First, caucusgoers express their preference for a candidate upon arrival, and these votes are recorded in a “first alignment.” Then, candidates with limited support at a precinct, usually less than 28 percent, are deemed not viable; their supporters get a chance to realign to support a viable candidate. The preference at this point is recorded as well, and it’s called the final alignment.
Viable candidates can’t lose support on realignment, but there were more than 12 cases where a viable candidate lost vote share in the final alignment, even though that is precluded by the caucus rules.
No new voters are permitted to join the caucus after the first alignment. But in at least 90 precincts, more than 4 percent of the total, there are more tabulated total votes on final alignment than on first alignment.
Many of these cases could be simple tabulation mistakes in a precinct caucus that otherwise went smoothly, like a West Des Moines precinct that reported the first alignment results only for the “nonviable” candidates (those who did not meet the (percent threshold) but still reported final alignment results for the viable ones. Others appear to be more serious.
At the next step in the process, each precinct allots county delegates based on final preference, and these county delegates are reported to the news media as “state delegate equivalents,” which approximate the number of delegates won at the state convention. Each precinct caucus gets a set number, but a handful of precincts allotted more state delegate equivalents than they had available.
Notably, there are dozens of precincts where there is a discrepancy between the final preference vote and the number of state delegate equivalents allotted. This includes more than 20 cases in which a candidate received fewer state delegate equivalents than another despite receiving more votes in the final alignment.
S.D.E.
Klobuchar
0. Sanders 41 Buttigieg Warren Biden 5 3 Bennet 1 S.D.E. Klobuchar 0. Sanders 41 Buttigieg Warren Biden 5 3 Bennet 1 In these cases, it is not clear whether the state delegates or the final alignment results were reported inaccurately. The Iowa Democratic Party has corrected some errors, but the errors became far more more on Wednesday as the count dragged on. On Wednesday afternoon, the Iowa Democratic Party released a wave of results showing Deval Patrick sweeping central Des Moines. That was incorrect. Mr. Sanders’s votes had been reported as being for Mr. Patrick, while Elizabeth Warren’s tallies went to Tom Steyer. A plausible explanation is that an Iowa Democratic Party staff member accidentally copied the results of one column too far to the left in a spreadsheet for some precincts. Such errors inevitably occur in manual data entry, but the Iowa Democratic Party does not appear to have enough quality checks to assure that it reports accurate results. The Iowa Democratic Party. quickly corrected these errors, and they are not included in our overall count of discrepancies in more than precincts. The party has not yet addressed other irregularities reported to it or circulating on social media. In another case, The Times alerted the party to an error at 6 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday that remained in the data released several hours later. S.D.E. Buttigieg 56 () 0.7 Warren 0. Sanders 51 0. Klobuchar 44 048 0. Steyer 56 Patrick 50 Biden 39 Uncommitted 2 Gabbard 1 S.D.E. Buttigieg 56 () 0.7 Warren 0. Sanders 51 0. Klobuchar 44 048 0. Steyer 56 Patrick 50 Biden 39 Uncommitted 2 Gabbard 1 The Times is continuing to report the Iowa Democratic caucus results as released by the party and has alerted the party to an extensive list of precinct errors. There is no reason to believe that Mr. Sanders or Mr. Buttigieg did materially better in the contaminated precincts than they did elsewhere, either over all or controlling for their demographic characteristics. But the tabulated result could be close enough for the remaining ambiguity to preclude a projection of a winner. Even if the appropriate candidate is deemed the winner, the irregularities in the results are likely to do little to restore public confidence in the Iowa caucuses. 
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