DES MOINES: Problems with a mobile app appeared to force a delay in reporting the results of the Iowa caucuses Monday, leaving the campaigns, voters and the media in election limbo and pressing for an explanation.
The Iowa Democratic Party said it expects to release data later Tuesday after manually verifying its data against paper backups. Chairman Tony Price said the delays were the result of a reporting issue, not a hack or intrusion.
But other caucus organizers put the blame squarely on a new technology used to report results from some 1,700 caucus meetings across the state. Glitches with a new mobile app caused confusion, they said, and some caucus organizers were forced to call in results for the state party to record manually, introducing human error and delays.
Des Moines County Democratic Chair Tom Courtney said he heard that in precincts across his county, including his own, the mobile app was “a mess.”
Precinct leaders were instead phoning in their results to the Democratic Party headquarters, and “they weren’t answering the phones,” Courtney said.
The problems were an embarrassment for a state that has long sought to protect its prized status as the first contest in presidential primaries and the nation’s first vetter of candidates. The delay was certain to become fodder for critics who argued that the caucuses — party
