One month after the Utah presidential caucuses, the state Republican party still has not published its final results as evidence amasses of a breakdown in the party’s new online voting system as well as email and other communication failures.

The 22 March caucus, which moved the reliably red state’s place in the presidential calendar up by three months, was notable for Ted Cruz’s lopsided victory and the firewall the establishment Republicans hoped Cruz could establish to block Donald Trump’s path to the nomination.

But the caucus also offered the kind of electoral dysfunction that Trump has repeatedly characterized as a “rigged system” – a private party election without state oversight and with little transparency about either its conduct or its exact outcome.

Days after stories of different sorts of electoral dysfunction emerged from New York and Arizona, Utah’s Republican party appears to be in disarray, with state and local party officials pointing fingers at each other as they gear up for this weekend’s state convention.

As of Friday, the state party’s website still linked to a results tally from 24 March showing 88.68% of precincts reporting, with some counties’ counts as low as 45%.

While these figures appear to be outdated, the state party could offer no reassurance that the vote count was in fact complete.

“Some people went out of town or are sick, causing a delay in getting information to us,” said party spokeswoman Cindie Quintana. “We are updating as we get results.” County officials with some of the lowest published tallies took vigorous exception to Quintana’s characterization of the problem, blaming the delays instead on email failures and US postal service deliveries that never arrived.

By far the biggest problem to emerge has been a new online voting system that the party hoped would encourage the participation of tens of thousands of extra people, including Mormon missionaries stationed abroad. On the eve of the election, the party told one news outlet that 59,000 had signed up to vote online.

Thereafter, party chair James Evans revised that figure down to 30,000, then to 27,000, acknowledging that as many as 13,000 people had tried to sign up but could not because of a variety of technical problems. Up and down the state, voters reported being unable to obtain the 30-character personalized password needed to register to vote online. Others were unable to enter it successfully.

“My wife called tech support to get a code issued or reissued and she sat on hold for hours. At one point, a voice came on and said, ‘All our operators are busy, goodbye’. A lot of people had challenges,” said Marc Stallings, a GOP legislative chair in St George in south-western Utah.

In response to the reported problems, the party extended the deadline for online registration by two days, leading to another potential problem, according to Marc McLemore, party chair in Garfield County in central Utah.

He said he received the list of voters earmarked for online voting before the new window for online registration had closed – raising at least the possibility that someone could vote twice, once online and again at their local precinct.

“The whole thing was not well enough organized,” McLemore said. “I don’t think the presidential voting went well at all.”

The state party disregarded warnings from prominent computer scientists and from the National Institute for Standards and Technology, which oversees federal certification of voting equipment, that online voting systems are dangerously vulnerable to malware, putting both the integrity and the secrecy of the vote at risk.

On the contrary, chairman Evans put out a statement after the election touting what he called the country’s “first completely online presidential election” in which turnout had reached “historical numbers”.

No part of that statement appears to be entirely correct. The caucus was not “completely online” because more than 200,000 people, according to the party, voted at their precincts, more than eight times the number said to have voted over the internet. It was also not a first in the United States, because the Arizona Democratic party experimented with online voting in its 2000 primary, with similarly unsatisfactory results.

Limited forms of online voting have occurred since, notably in Alaska.

Turnout on 22 March was not “historical” – in fact it was significantly lower than in 2008, when Utah held primaries instead of caucuses.

The mess has led to a lot of finger-pointing and not a lot of clarity. Smartmatic, the London-based international voting equipment company that ran the online election in Utah, distanced itself from any role in the registration process when first asked about it by the Guardian. That part of the election, a spokesman said, had been handled by the online event site Eventbrite.

Eventbrite denied causing any problems, saying it had nothing to do with issuing passwords or other technical aspects of the election. It had merely provided the state party with a “pre-RSVP” list of who wanted to participate in the caucus, and how. “We experienced no issues at any point in time with registrations for the caucuses,” a company spokesperson said.

Smartmatic then revised its initial statement, saying much of the confusion arose not because of password problems but because people who had signed up with Eventbrite did not necessarily realise they needed to do anything else. Smartmatic said 27,490 people ended up registering to vote online, and 24,486 actually voted that way.

Evans, the state GOP chair, did not respond to multiple, detailed invitations to comment. In his public statements, he has remained upbeat about online voting and says he will recommend its reuse in 2020. County-level officials, by contrast, expressed deep dissatisfaction with the Smartmatic voting system. “At best, it was flawed,” McLemore, the Garfield County chair, said. “It either needs to be done away with, or fixed. I don’t care which.”