Chaos at the Caucuses

“We know there’s delays, but we know one thing: We are punching above our weight,” she told a cheering crowd at her Iowa headquarters. “I cannot wait. Somehow, some way I am going to get on a plane to New Hampshire. We are bringing our ticket to New Hampshire.”

Within the hour, former Vice President Joe Biden and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had followed suit with their own not-quite-victory speeches.

As my colleague Elaine Godfrey reported this morning, some Iowa Democrats were worried that new rules for counting and reporting results from individual caucus sites would lead to confusion and chaos. The caucuses, themselves, appeared to run smoothly enough; the trouble stemmed instead from problems with the new application that precinct chairs were asked to use for reporting the numbers. The app was intended to help caucus organizers tally results, apportion delegates, and send in final counts to the Iowa Democratic Party. Earlier in the day, Bloomberg reported that several caucus leaders across the state were unable to use the new app, and would have to send in their results via a party hotline.

Read: The Iowa caucuses could go very wrong

But the backup phone system appeared to be overwhelmed as well. “The hotline has not been responsive,” Shawn Sebastian, a precinct secretary, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer around 11 p.m., explaining that he had been on hold for over an hour. While Sebastian was live on the air, he was taken off hold. But by the time he tried to report his results, the operator had hung up.

What began as a simple tallying delay had become something of a disaster for Iowa Democrats, who were already facing calls that their antiquated, in-person system for choosing candidates was a poor match for a national party prioritizing diversity and greater access to the polls. Brad Parscale, President Donald Trump’s campaign manager, suggested the results would be “rigged” in a barely-veiled attempt to sow doubts among Democrats who believed the party intervened to swing the nomination to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

By the end of the night, however, Biden’s campaign was also furious. “The integrity of the process is critical, and there were flaws in the reporting systems tonight that should raise serious concerns for voters,” tweeted Biden spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield. The campaign’s lawyers had already sent an angry letter to the state party, saying its systems had “failed.”

This was not the first time the Iowa caucuses have gone awry. In 2012, Republicans never truly knew whether Rick Santorum or Mitt Romney had gained more support. And four years later, confusion about the close gap between Clinton and Sanders led Iowa Democrats to reform their process with the hope of providing a more precise picture of which candidate had won the most votes and which candidate would receive the most delegates.

As Monday turned into Tuesday, that picture had yet to emerge, and Iowa Democrats will have to regroup yet again to figure out what went wrong. Whether they get another chance to get it right four years from now is another question entirely.

Elaine Godfrey contributed reporting from Iowa.

Russell Berman is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.