DES MOINES, Iowa _ Partial results of the Iowa caucuses will be released at 4 p.m. Central time Tuesday, according officials from several campaigns who were briefed about the Iowa Democratic Party's plans.
Iowa caucus results were not released Monday night because of reporting problems. State party officials told campaign leaders that 50% of the results would be released Tuesday, but no timeline yet exists for a full release.
Former Vice President Joe Biden's campaign aides have opposed the idea of a partial release.
"What we're just asking is make sure we're showing that, showing how we're arriving at the conclusion and I don't know if they can do all that by 4," Biden's senior advisor Symone Sanders told reporters in New Hampshire.
Iowa's first-in-the-nation nominating contest was badly marred by reporting mishaps, which centered on an app that precinct captains around the state were supposed to use to report results to the state party. By Tuesday afternoon, a growing number of Democratic officials were calling for Iowa to lose its position as the first state in the nominating calendar over the failure to report results for nearly 21 hours after Iowans gathered in caucuses around the state.
State party officials defended the delay, saying the accuracy of the count was their primary concern.
"While our plan is to release results as soon as possible today, our ultimate goal is to ensure that the integrity and accuracy of the process continues to be upheld," state party Chairman Troy Price said in a written statement.
The delay generated consternation among Democratic candidates, gloating from President Donald Trump, a flowering of conspiracy theories on social media and concerns about whether there could be a repeat in the Nevada caucuses later this month.
Nevada State Democratic Party Chairman William McCurdy II, however, pledged that his party was prepared for its Feb. 22 caucuses.
"What happened in the Iowa caucus last night will not happen in Nevada," McCurdy said in a written statement. "We will not be employing the same app or vendor used in the Iowa caucus. We had already developed a series of backups and redundant reporting systems, and are currently evaluating the best path forward."
Meanwhile, Iowa Democratic workers were in the midst of manually tallying backup paper ballots with no clear timeline on how long it will take for a full accounting.
Price offered no new details about the failure beyond saying that a coding error led to "inconsistencies" in reported results.
"As precinct caucus results started coming in, the IDP ran them through an accuracy and quality check. It became clear that there were inconsistencies with the reports," he said.
"As part of our investigation, we determined with certainty that the underlying data collected via the app was sound. While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data."
Under new rules adopted for this election cycle, Iowa Democratic officials were supposed to report three different sets of numbers, counting how many people supported each candidate initially, how many supported each candidate once lagging candidates were dropped and voters realigned, and the number of delegates each candidate netted. Ensuring that all three sets of figures were consistent appears to have been a significant problem.
Unlike primary elections, which are run by government officials, the Iowa caucuses are staffed by thousands of volunteers, many of them retirees, recruited by the state Democratic and Republican parties. The Democrats introduced a new, more complex reporting system this year, and it appears to have overwhelmed the volunteers' ability to use it at the more than 1,600 caucuses held around the state. The cellphone service required to use the app is also spotty in rural swaths of the state.
Precinct captains told The Times on Monday night that there were additional problems, including an inability to log in, and that state Democrats were aware of the problems well before the caucuses started.
John Grennan, co-chair of the Poweshiek County Democrats, said opportunities to train on the app in advance of caucus night did not bode well.
"They had all these issues," Grennan said. "We were supposed to be getting invitations to use it. The invites would never arrive." The communications Grennan did receive were confusing, he said.
When the big night came, Grennan, who was running the caucus site at Grinnell College, said the app appeared to be working as he input results, but he couldn't tell with certainty.
"I kept getting kicked off," Grennan said, adding the app would reset if stopped partway through to help with voters. He decided to call the party's hotline for a specific question about counting voters who left midway through the lengthy caucus process.
"I got put on hold for 25 minutes and then I gave up," Grennan said late Monday night. "I'm 90% sure it went through (on the app.) I'll have to work under the assumption that if it's not there, they're going to call me."
Grennan planned on driving to Des Moines on Tuesday to deliver the results in person.
William Baresel, the Democratic chair in Floyd County, in the eastern part of the state, had three precincts unable to report their results to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters and said he spent an hour on hold with the party officials before he finally got through and reported his results.
Baresel's caucus chairs "couldn't get the app to work," and so he volunteered to stay up late into the night to phone in the results to the state party.
"Once we got through, everything was fine," Baresel said.
One caucus chair in Floyd County had few problems reporting the results by phone earlier in the night _ because she didn't even try to use the app in the first place.
"I never used the app because the internet at the site we use is iffy," said Susan Nelson, who spent about 15 minutes on hold with the state party shortly after her caucus ended at 8 p.m.
The chaos in reporting results could threaten Iowa's much-coveted first-in-the-nation status, which has come under growing scrutiny in recent presidential elections.
In 2012, Republicans wrongly crowned Mitt Romney the victor on caucus night. More than two weeks later, state GOP officials announced that former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum had actually won, but at that point, Romney was riding the momentum from his Iowa win toward the party's nomination.
Four years later, Democratic Party leaders were unable to track down tallies in several precincts, meaning they could not officially name Hillary Clinton the winner until more than half a day after the caucuses ended.
"I think the Democratic caucus in Iowa is a quirky, quaint tradition which should come to an end," Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said on MSNBC on Tuesday. "As we try to make voting easier for people across America, the Iowa caucus is the most painful situation we currently face for voting."
National Republicans and President Trump slashed at Iowa Democrats as incompetent.
"The Democrat Caucus is an unmitigated disaster. Nothing works, just like they ran the Country," Trump tweeted Tuesday morning.
Iowa Republicans, however, came out publicly to defend the caucus system, which both parties have benefited from. Gov. Kim Reynolds and Sens. Charles E. Grassley and Joni Ernst issued a joint statement saying that the retail politicking that the caucuses require empowers voters and cannot be replicated elsewhere.
"The process is not suffering because of a short delay in knowing the final results," the trio said. "Iowans and all Americans should know we have complete confidence that every last vote will be counted and every last voice will be heard."
Without official caucus results, Democratic candidates took to the airwaves Tuesday morning to advance their own narratives.
Pete Buttigieg, who delivered a forceful victory speech Monday night, said his confident posture was based on internal campaign data.
"We're waiting for the official information to come in," the former South Bend, Ind., mayor said on CNN on Tuesday morning, "but by any reckoning, we had an extraordinary night that is propelling us for a win in New Hampshire."
Tom Steyer, the billionaire hedge fund manager turned activist, could hardly suppress a broad grin on MSNBC even as he acknowledged "the system had a very bad night last night."
Asserting the muddled results had cracked the race "wide open," Steyer said the biggest loser was Joe Biden.
"He was the presumptive winner of this whole thing," Steyer said. "He was the person who everybody thought was going to walk away with it. And it turns out that's not true."
The Biden campaign, meanwhile, cautioned against over-interpreting the incomplete data put out by rival campaigns.
"The fact of the matter is, we don't have the official data and it's not verified," said deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield on MSNBC.
