The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, heads the vote count of the Iowa Democratic caucus after a disastrous election day that just Tuesday afternoon, almost 24 hours later, is producing the first partial results.
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Buttigieg accumulates 26.9% of state delegates with 62% of the accounting made. It is followed by Bernie Sanders with 25.1% of the votes, Senator Elizabeth Warren with 18.3% and former Vice President Joe Biden with 15.6%. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar accumulates 12.6%, entrepreneurs Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer with 1.1% and 0.3% respectively.
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“The results show our campaign first,” Buttigieg said in his first reaction. “This validates the idea that we can deliver our unifying message,” said the mayor who, if the result was confirmed, would put it in an extraordinary position for the rest of the primaries.
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The president of the Democratic Party in Iowa, Troy Price, said that what happened was unacceptable and that he apologized for it: “My priority is the accuracy of the results,” he said after the serious inconveniences they faced.
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He added that making 100% of the delegates known will take some more time, but he assured the media that they have all the backups and the paper record that guarantee the transparency of the process.
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Although Sanders is ahead in the popular vote this does not mean that he will take the majority of the 41 delegates at stake.
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In addition, during the July Democratic convention that formally nominates the presidential candidate, delegates from other applicants may end up giving their support to another.
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These numbers are released after the Iowa Democratic Party met a few hours ago with the presidential candidates’ campaigns to announce the publication of “the majority of the results” at 05:00 pm Eastern Time. which generated protests from some candidates waiting for the total result of the scrutiny.
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The appearance of inconsistencies, a new voting system and the apparent error in the coding of the application that was designed to commentabilize the votes in Iowa joined in a day qualified by observers as embarrassing, especially because it is the first chapter of the primaries Democrats to elect Donald Trump’s opponent in the November presidential elections.
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The application that the Iowa Democratic Party commissioned to tabulate and report on the results of partisan assemblies was not adequately tested at the state level, sources from that political organization told various national media. For this reason, the party decided to use the application only after another proposal to publicize the votes, and which implied calling the caucuses by telephone, was abandoned on the advice of officials of the National Democratic Committee.
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Shadow Inc., the company behind the app used last night, apologized in its first public comment on the problems: “We sincerely regret the delay in reporting the results of the Iowa caucuses last night and the uncertainty it has caused candidates, their campaigns and those attending the Democratic caucus, “the company said in a tweet.
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