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IOWA CAUCUSES DESCEND INTO CHAOS AS DELAY LEAVES OUTCOME UNCERTAIN (SADLY, THE ONLY ONE WHO BENEFITS IS TRUMP AND PUTIN)

By Matt Viser and Toluse Olorunnipa | Published Feb 04 at 1:38 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted Feb 4, 2020 |

DES MOINES — The long-anticipated Iowa caucuses turned into a debacle Monday night when technical problems delayed the results, prompting presidential candidates to depart before the outcome was clear, spurring one campaign to challenge the integrity of the process and producing a muddled situation instead of what Democratic leaders hoped would be a decisive beginning to their attempt to oust President Trump.

Hours after voters at more than 1,600 caucus sites declared their presidential preferences, Democratic officials were scrambling to explain why no results had been released and when they might materialize. As midnight neared, state party leaders met hastily with the campaigns — a phone call that ended abruptly, according to someone familiar with it — and sought to reassure the public about the reliability of a caucus system that has long been criticized as quirky and byzantine.

“The integrity of the results is paramount,” Iowa Democratic Party spokeswoman Mandy McClure said as candidates, voters and activists waited in frustration and reports circulated about problems with the app that caucus officials used to transmit the results. McClure added: “This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”

But it was a difficult culmination of a year of relentless campaigning by dozens of candidates and hundreds of volunteers in Iowa. The delay raised the prospect that some campaigns would continue to question the results for weeks, complicating an already tumultuous nomination fight.

In a letter sent to the Iowa Democratic Party, obtained by The Washington Post, officials with former vice president Joe Biden’s campaign questioned whether the results should be made official. “We believe that the campaigns deserve full explanations and relevant information regarding the methods of quality control you are employing, and an opportunity to respond, before any official results are released,” the letter said.

The glitch was arguably a setback for the campaigns that did well, by depriving them of a chance to declare victory Monday night, and a boon for candidates who fell short, by sowing confusion about the results. Some campaign officials said they had the impression that results could be released Tuesday, but the party made no statement in that regard.

Trump campaign officials wasted little time in fanning the flames, seizing the opportunity to sow divisions among Democrats. “It would be natural for people to doubt the fairness of the process,” campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement, suggesting in a tweet that it was “rigged.”

The episode is also sure to amplify complaints about the Iowa caucuses themselves. Some Democrats have long questioned not only the complex process but the fact that the first votes are taken in a largely white state that they say does not reflect the party’s growing diversity.

“This is a total mess,” tweeted Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor who ended his own presidential campaign several weeks ago and has endorsed Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “I respect the people of Iowa, they’ve been great — but it’s become very clear that our democracy has been misserved by a broken system.”

As Monday night wore on, problems were evident across the state. In a precinct in Dubuque, the tally was delayed for more than an hour as caucus officials encountered problems reporting the numbers through the app set up by the state party.

Shawn Sebastian, secretary for a caucus in Story County, tweeted that he had been on hold for more than an hour trying to report results from his precinct to the party hotline. “The app just straight up wasn’t working,” Sebastian said in an interview.

At a caucus in Iowa City, volunteers also were not able to report the results electronically. At about 11 p.m., caucus leaders were still on hold with state party leaders as they tried to deliver the results by phone. “He couldn’t get the app downloaded on his phone,” caucus organizer John Deeth said of the official responsible for reporting the results.

Unwilling to wait longer, the candidates began speaking at their caucus night parties, making allusions to the delays. “It’s going to be a long night, but I’m feeling good,” Biden said.

“So listen, it’s too close to call,” Warren told her own supporters. “Iowa, tonight, you showed that big dreams are still possible in America.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told his crowd wryly, “At some point, the results will be announced,” adding that he was confident that when that happened, he would do well.

Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., took another approach altogether, essentially declaring victory despite the widespread uncertainty. “We don’t know all the results, but we do know by the time it is all said and done, Iowa, you have shocked the nation,” he said. “By all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.”

Before the results came in, the race appeared knotted among four top candidates, reflecting many Democrats’ fear of making the wrong choice to defeat a president they revile. While Sanders seemed to gain late momentum, it was far from certain that that would translate into a clear victory within the complex rules that govern the contest here.

It was a crucial moment for Biden, who entered the race as a strong front-runner but had lately sought to temper expectations in a state that was the political graveyard of his two previous presidential campaigns. Although his campaign had argued that Biden would be viable in nearly all precincts, in some early precincts he was falling short.

Warren was gambling on an elaborate organization to boost her results, while Buttigieg hoped that large crowds in the final days reflected hidden strength.

Monday’s caucuses culminated more than three years of anger and disillusionment for a party that has lacked a standard-bearer to fight back against Trump. As Iowans gathered, the Senate was in the final stages of the president’s impeachment trial, heading toward an almost certain acquittal.

The senators running for president had to race back to Iowa from Washington to make it to their caucus night parties. In another indication of the chaotic political moment, several are planning to skip Trump’s State of the Union address in Washington on Tuesday night so they can start campaigning in New Hampshire.

Early entrance polls showed that voters were motivated by health care, climate change and foreign policy. But roughly 6 in 10 caucus-goers said beating Trump was more important than agreeing with a candidate’s positions. About 3 in 10 voters said they decided which candidate to support in the past few days — about twice as many as were late deciders in 2016.

The candidates now enter an intense month, starting with the New Hampshire primary next Tuesday and culminating on Super Tuesday, March 3, when more than a dozen states hold votes.

Among the nearly 4,000 pledged delegates at the Democratic National Convention, Iowa awards just 41. But because it goes first, it plays an outsize role in setting expectations for future contests, handing some candidates momentum and leaving others struggling to justify their ongoing bids.

Because of the caucuses’ complicated rules, more than one contender may be able to claim some measure of victory. Iowans — at schools, community centers and other gathering places — began by dividing up according to their favored candidate, yielding an initial set of results, which for the first time will be released this year.

In a second round, the candidates who got less than 15 percent were eliminated and their supporters could align with other candidates, yielding a potentially different result, and one that will be used to allocate the convention delegates. Party officials have stressed that they place the most importance on who gets the biggest share of delegates.

Republicans held caucuses Monday as well, with Trump the prohibitive favorite. And the president has interjected himself in the Democratic contest, for example using a recent television interview to aim insults at the contenders.

The caucuses came after more than a year of relentless campaigning, with visits to VFW halls and diners, appearances at the hot and sticky Iowa State Fair, and flat drives past snow-topped fields.

A rollicking race that began with 28 candidates narrowed to 11, and the results here are likely to help winnow it further. But what began as a historically large and diverse field has shrunk to a group of mostly white, male, older candidates, to the frustration of many Democratic activists.

While the race has showcased differences over health care, climate change and other issues, it has been defined more than anything by the argument over who has the best chance to defeat Trump.

Sanders, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, argues that only he can mobilize a new class of disaffected voters using economic populism as a political stimulant, while Biden has made the case that Democrats need to energize black voters and working-class whites with a message of returning to normalcy after the chaos and vulgarity of the Trump presidency.

Warren has cast herself as falling somewhere in the middle, while Buttigieg — the only top candidate younger than 70 — has argued for generational change.

The caucuses were considered especially critical to the viability of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who outlasted several better-known candidates and campaigned heavily on her ability to win over Trump voters in rural, Midwestern and Republican areas. It was also a singular challenge for Andrew Yang, who has never held elective office but whose staying power has defied expectations; he is one of the last remaining minority candidates in the race.

The outcome was also important for a candidate not on the ballot: former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg. The 77-year-old billionaire was paying close attention to Iowa, hoping to emerge as a moderate alternative if Sanders or Warren performed well and Biden faltered.

Several contenders were in dire need of an Iowa win to fuel donations for campaign accounts that have dwindled after recent spending binges, with candidates investing heavily in a hoped-for victory in the state.

The Iowa caucuses were in a sense the opening chapter of a debate that Democrats will have, state by state, in the months to come.

They were the first major test of Biden’s theory that he is the most electable Democrat, a case that his campaign has been making for months. Despite low turnout at his events, his advisers were banking on the goodwill he’s built up over nearly five decades in public life.

But Democratic officials around the state have for months raised alarms about the former vice president’s campaign operation, saying he hadn’t taken the time to build an organization that would allow him to overcome the lack of fervent enthusiasm for his candidacy.

Biden’s commitment to the state also ebbed and flowed. It wasn’t until early December that he visited Ames — one of Iowa’s largest cities — and there, the first questioner rose and chided him for not being in the state as often as his rivals were. But in the past two months he came often, and in the end he and the super PAC supporting him aired $9 million in ads here.

Biden was hoping that would be enough to reverse his fortunes in a state that has spelled doom for him in the past. In 1987, he quit the presidential race after he was accused of plagiarizing from a British politician during a speech in Des Moines. In 2008, he dropped out after coming in a distant fifth in the Iowa caucuses, receiving less than 1 percent of the vote.

Warren, in turn, saw expectations for her performance grow in the final week, with a closing message focused on unity and pragmatism. “Our number one job is to beat Donald Trump,” Warren told a group of 50,000 Iowans who called in Monday for a tele-town hall, since the senator was stuck in Washington for the impeachment trial. “I think I’m the best person to do that. And I’ll tell you why: I’m the one who can pull our party together.”

She also directly addressed in recent days the question of whether a woman can beat Trump. She noted that since Trump’s victory, Democratic female candidates have prevailed more frequently than men in competitive races. “I am the only person in this race who has beaten an incumbent Republican anytime in the last 30 years,” Warren said during her tele-town hall.

Still, heading into the caucuses, it was Sanders who seemed to have the most momentum, judging by polls and crowd sizes, with some in the party bracing themselves for the possibility that he could win the first two states on a march toward the nomination.

Sanders fought Hillary Clinton to a near-draw in Iowa four years ago, losing the state to her by the slimmest of margins. This time, he was hoping to leave Iowa as the candidate everyone else is chasing — an unfamiliar spot for a politician more accustomed to running as an insurgent underdog.

Sanders’s aides have long believed that Iowa would be key to their success and have already begun looking ahead to Nevada and California, two other early states where they think they can perform strongly in the coming weeks.

It was clear heading into the caucuses that a poor showing could be a serious blow to some of the top-tier candidates and potentially reshape the race. Iowa has long been seen as a make-or-break state for Buttigieg, for example, and his campaign was particularly focused on finishing ahead of Biden.

Buttigieg spent more time in Iowa in January than his rivals did and held more than 50 town halls here in the past three weeks, the last few visibly larger and more energetic.

Beyond the candidates’ individual performances, Democratic Party officials were watching turnout numbers as a way to gauge voter enthusiasm.

Through much of 2019, officials predicted that caucus participation would break the record set in 2008, when nearly 240,000 people participated and powered a win by Barack Obama. The state party moved some precincts to larger locations and held “satellite” caucuses earlier in the day to accommodate work and child-care schedules.

While Trump did not face serious competition in his bid for the party’s nomination, the president’s campaign nonetheless sought to use the caucuses as a trial run for November and an opportunity to engage with supporters in a state that helped propel his electoral college victory in 2016.

The Trump campaign said it was dispatching more than 80 surrogates, including several Cabinet officials and Trump family members, for the caucuses, hoping to boost Republican enthusiasm in Iowa at a time when Democrats have been the main focus in the state.

The surrogates also had another task: inflaming tensions within the Democratic Party. Before the caucuses, many of Trump’s allies accused the Democratic establishment of trying to rig the election against Sanders, amplifying an evidence-free claim that the president has made repeatedly in an effort to turn Democrats against each other.

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Scott Clement, Chelsea Janes, Annie Linskey, Paul Schwartzman, Sean Sullivan and Cleve R. Wootson Jr. contributed to this report.

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‘It kind of failed us’: With eyes of the world on Iowa, another hiccup in American democracy

By Isaac Stanley-Becker | Published

February 04 at 6:26 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted Feb 4, 2020 |

DES MOINES — She couldn't get the mobile app to work. And she couldn't get through to the state party. So Linda Nelson, the Democratic chairwoman in Pottawattamie County, chose her next best option: Facebook.

“HELP!” she wrote, describing how she kept getting an error message on the app she needed to report caucus-night returns to the Iowa Democratic Party, the group tasked with the high-profile responsibility of beginning the process of choosing a presidential nominee.

After years of preparation designed to prevent the chaos and confusion that marred the caucuses in 2016, and after careful planning aimed at preventing the spread of conspiracy theories by hostile foreign actors, Democrats began their high-stakes nominating contest Monday under a cloud of uncertainty and dysfunction. Shortly before midnight, the Iowa caucuses were in a state of suspended confusion — with precincts unable to communicate results, state party officials huddling with aides to the top candidates and, above all, a blemish on the process held out by the state as a model of civic engagement.

The state party predicted results would arrive sometime Tuesday, and there was no suggestion of malfeasance or a corrupted outcome, but the delay meant the global spotlight trained on Iowa illuminated yet another hiccup in the workings of American democracy.

The chaos provided an opportunity for some to sow doubts about the credibility of the nominating process, illustrating how the opacity of the contest in Iowa invites efforts to undermine its legitimacy.

Brad Parscale, the manager for President Trump’s reelection campaign, took to Twitter to suggest without evidence that the process was “rigged.” He followed up with a formal statement, reveling in the confusion. “Democrats are stewing in a caucus mess of their own creation with the sloppiest train wreck in history,” Parscale said.

Additional doubts were raised by senior Democratic campaign aides. A lawyer for Joe Biden’s campaign addressed a letter to state party officials citing “considerable flaws in tonight’s Iowa Caucus reporting system.”

“The app that was intended to relay Caucus results to the Party failed; the Party’s back-up telephonic reporting system likewise has failed,” wrote the campaign’s general counsel, Dana Remus. “Now, we understand that Caucus Chairs are attempting to — and, in many cases, failing to — report results telephonically to the Party.”

Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, tweeted that the “integrity of the process is critical.”

Suspicion was deepened by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) — a backer of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — who amplified a tweet early Tuesday suggesting that the app’s developer was tied to former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign. A representative of the company named in the post didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Buttigieg’s campaign also didn’t immediately respond.

Meanwhile, with no results reported, Buttigieg effectively declared himself the winner — telling supporters during an overnight appearance that, in Iowa, “an improbable hope became and undeniable reality.”

“By all indications,” he said, “we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.”

And, despite the lack of any numbers from the state party, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) told supporters hours after the caucuses, “We are punching above our weight.”

The state party said it was laboring to obtain and verify results after finding several instances of inconsistent returns.

“We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results,” said Mandy McClure, a spokeswoman for the state party. “In addition to the tech systems being used to tabulate results, we are also using photos of results and a paper trail to validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report.”

She said the difficulty was a “reporting issue,” emphasizing that the app “did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion.”

“The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results,” McClure added.

It was unclear why caucus leaders were having such severe problems with the technology, or why they hadn’t adequately familiarized themselves with the software.

“What am I doing wrong?” asked Nelson, the chairwoman in Pottawattamie County, unable to get answers from the email address provided by the party and so turning to social media.

Across the state in Linn County, caucus chairs were snapping pictures of results in their precincts and attempting to text the images to the Iowa Democratic Party, after getting stuck on the app and failing to get through when they called party headquarters in Des Moines, according to Bret Niles, the county’s Democratic chairman.

“People are getting hung up at different phases of the app,” Niles said. “They tried that and either they can’t get through or they get through and it takes a while. Or they’re calling to report the results and it’s just a large number of people trying to get through.”

At about 11 p.m. Central time, caucus leaders in Johnson County were still waiting on hold with the Iowa Democratic Party so they could report the results over the phone.

“He couldn’t get the app downloaded on his phone,” John Deeth, a caucus organizer, said of one precinct leader.

Elesha Gayman, the Democratic chairwoman in Scott County, said the problem, perversely, was too much security. “It was so secure that people got locked out and couldn’t get back in,” she said. “It kind of failed us.”

Sean Bagniewski, the chairman of the Polk County Democrats, said there was no training from the state party on how to use the app.

Iowa Democrats took great pains to prevent this very situation. A breakdown in reporting on the mobile app was among the scenarios used in a role-play run in Des Moines last fall by the Defending Digital Democracy Project at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The state party, along with its Republican counterpart, partnered with the project’s leaders for a simulation in November. They were joined by security experts as well as developers behind the website and mobile app used by the parties to publicize caucus details and report returns.

Details of a problem would arrive via email, bringing news, for example, of difficulty with the app or of false tweets claiming that the caucuses began at a different time. Democrats used the simulation to develop possible plans for caucus night, including contingencies such as bringing in the Department of Homeland Security and contacting executives at Twitter.

“Iowa has the honor of holding our first in the nation caucuses,” Troy Price, the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, said in an interview last month about efforts to revamp the process to prevent chaos. “This is a responsibility that we take very seriously — to make sure to protect the integrity of our process and secure the choices of Iowans in this process.”

In a statement early Tuesday, Price said, “We are validating every piece of data we have against our paper trail.”

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Michael Scherer, Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Chelsea Janes contributed to this report.

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An epic breakdown in Iowa casts a spotlight on the caucus system

By Dan Balz | Published February 04 at 12:57 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 04, 2020 |

DES MOINES — Iowa Democrats spent a year evaluating a record-large field of presidential candidates, all in search of someone they believed could defeat President Trump in November. But on the night they were asked to deliver a definitive result, the precinct caucus system broke down, and Iowa's place in the nominating process became the story.

Hours passed as the Iowa Democratic Party struggled to reconcile conflicting numbers from the nearly 1,700 precincts. Partial numbers from selected caucus sites that were being covered by television networks painted a confusing and sometimes conflicting portrait of what was happening.

In the absence of results in real time, it was anybody's guess who was winning. By the time the results are reported, perhaps on Tuesday, they could be subject to challenge or questions from one or another of the campaigns, and the scene will have shifted to New Hampshire, whose primary will be held on Feb. 11.

The one conclusion from the numbers that were being collected by the media suggested that the eventual winner would receive a lower percentage of the vote than any previous winner since 1972, when the modern caucuses were born. But that could end up being the secondary story. On Monday night, it was all about Iowa and not the candidates.

Iowans have prided themselves on their first-in-the-nation caucuses. Voters in the state have taken their role seriously, and over the years, a culture has developed here of citizens who turn out to see and evaluate the candidates firsthand. Democrats often have ended up settling on a candidate who would go on to win the party's nomination.

But whatever the culture that exists in evaluating candidates, Iowa has also come under strong and recurring criticism for exercising outsize influence on the nominating process. This predominantly white state, where agriculture is a dominant industry, is far from representative of the nation. The absence of a larger minority population, especially for a Democratic Party that has become increasingly diverse in its makeup, rubs raw many non-Iowa Democrats.

Beyond that, the caucus system itself is a target of criticism. Unlike primary elections, in which voters can cast their ballots in secret at any time of the day when the polls are open, the caucus process is far more demanding. Participants must arrive by a fixed time in the evening and be prepared to stay for several hours as the process of alignment and realignment plays out.

The caucuses disenfranchise some voters who, because of working hours or other issues, are not able to be at their precinct sites at the appointed hour. This year, special provisions were made to make it possible for those people to attend satellite caucuses at different hours. Still, the caucuses are cumbersome and to critics unfair as a result.

The caucuses were designed originally as party-building mechanisms, generally used by smaller states. For presidential candidates, they are seen as a test of organizing capability.

Defenders of the caucuses and of Iowa have long said that this is one of the few places where candidates must meet voters face to face, where they must answer questions and listen and perhaps learn about real life.

But even in Iowa, there are questions about the prominence the state plays, given its demographics and small size. Now there is a bigger problem, and there is little doubt that it will bring more pressure than ever before on Iowa's leaders to justify the system they have built.

The irony Monday night's breakdown was that it was the second time in three days when the expected did not happen. On Saturday night, the Iowa Poll, long considered the most reliable pre-caucus indicator of the standing of the candidates, was pulled just before it was to be released after technical problems threw into doubt the reliability of the findings.

Now the results of the caucuses themselves are being called into question. The campaign of former vice president Joe Biden sent a letter to the Iowa Democratic Party demanding answers and putting the party on notice about the eventual results. People in two campaigns said state party leaders hung up on a conference call when the leaders were pressed about when results would be released.

Around 11:30 p.m., as everyone was still waiting for the first official results, Mandy McClure, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Democratic Party issued a statement.

"We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results," she said. "In addition to the tech systems being used to tabulate results, we are also using photos of results and a paper trail to validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report."

If Monday's problems were an isolated example, that would be one thing. But this is the third time in as many caucus nights when Iowa has struggled to determine the winner in real time.

Eight years ago, Mitt Romney was declared the narrow victor over Rick Santorum on the night of the Republican caucuses. But the absence of full results on caucus night left the outcome unresolved. Weeks later, Santorum was declared the official winner, but too late for it to give his campaign the boost he needed.

Four years ago, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders battled throughout a long night of counting. Clinton's campaign claimed victory without knowing for certain that she had won. In the end, her margin was less than half a percentage point, and the Sanders campaign never truly believed that he had lost.

In the absence of results on Monday, cable television provided reports from individual caucus sites. What the television audience saw was not particularly reassuring, especially to those who have been skeptical of or simply do not understand the caucus process.

Iowans gather in their precincts, break into groups to show support for their candidates, and are counted. When that count is completed, candidates who do not meet a threshold of 15 percent support in the precinct are declared not viable. Supporters of a nonviable candidate are then free to move to support another candidate.

It sounds complicated and looked even more complicated on television.

Party officials had prepared what they believed was a system for reporting results that would be easy to use by precinct leaders and protected against possible cyberattack.

But this year also brought changes in reporting the numbers. Historically, the Democrats have reported a single number, something called "state delegate equivalents," a percentage based on a formula devised by the party. That number, however, doesn't truly reflect the number of people who show up for each candidate, only the order of finish among the candidates who are viable after realignment.

This year, the state party, in the interest of transparency and pressed by the Democratic National Committee, said it would report two other numbers, including the number of people who supported each candidate at the start of the caucuses. But as Monday turned to Tuesday, the party was left to tally the results with a backup system.

The absence of results created an odd ending to the evening — a series of speeches by the candidates all claiming in one way or another success or victory, and a promise to take the fight on to New Hampshire.

That wasn't supposed to be the way Monday ended. Iowans were hoping to show the rest of the country how they finally evaluated the candidates. Instead, even if the results are eventually reported, there will be a new and more challenging assessment of the caucus system.

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