The 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses took place in Iowa, United States, on Monday, February 3, 2020. These caucuses are the first nominating contest in the Democratic Party primaries for the 2020 presidential election. The Iowa caucuses are a closed caucus, with Iowa awarding 49 delegates, of which 41 are pledged delegates allocated on the basis of the results of the caucuses.
The contest caused controversy due to a delay in reporting the results, which stemmed at least in part from the Iowa Democratic Party's decision to use a mobile application for results reporting.
The next primary contest is the 2020 New Hampshire Democratic primary, to be held February 11.
Delay in Final Results
As of February 4 at 2 p.m. local time, the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) had not reported any final results due to what a party spokesperson described as "quality checks". According to The New York Times, a new app-based reporting system may have been responsible for the delay, with Sean Bagniewski, the Polk County Democratic Party chairman, reporting that only "20% of his 177 precinct chairs" could access the app. In a statement released on February 3 at 10:30 p.m. local time,
IDP communications director Mandy McClure stated that "inconsistencies" had been found in the three sets of results. However, McClure also assured that the delay was not the result of a "hack or intrusion" and that the overall results are "sound". During the delay in the release of final results, the campaigns of Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders both released incomplete results taken by their
respective precinct captains, respectively showing the two candidates as having won the caucus. Also during the delay, Amy Klobuchar's campaign manager, Justin Buoen, claimed that Klobuchar either exceeded or equaled the number of votes that Joe Biden received.
Problems encountered included usage and interface failures of an app designed to report final vote tallies for Iowa precinct captains; a backlog of phone calls to the state vote-reporting hotline, including at least one case of a precinct captain being placed off of an hour-long hold only for the hotline attendant to immediately hang up on him; confusion about coin flips to decide delegates; the need to use backup paper ballots to verify the results; and discrepancies between backup paper ballots and tallies by precinct captains. Data had to be entered manually, which took longer than expected.
The morning after the caucus, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price issued a clarifying statement, reiterating that they did not believe there was a "cyber security intrusion," and that "data collected via the app was sound." Rather, due to a "coding issue in the reporting system," the app was only reporting out "partial data" from what had been recorded. This flaw was verified by comparison to the paper vote records and examination of the underlying data recorded by the app. The Iowa Democratic Party said in a statement that it planned to release partial results at 4 p.m. local time on Tuesday, nearly a full day after caucuses began.
The app was developed by a company called Shadow Inc. Along with the Iowa Democratic Party, Pete Buttigieg's and Joe Biden's campaigns paid the technological firm, causing controversy. Buttigieg's spent $42,500 on software services and Biden's $1,225 on text messaging.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Iowa_Democratic_caucuses
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