Nicole Gaudiano

USA TODAY

Bernie Sanders, hours after Hillary Clinton was declared the winner of the Iowa caucuses, said he wasn’t ready to concede the race.

The Vermont independent told reporters on Tuesday that his Iowa team is looking into the veracity of the results that gave Clinton the narrowest win in the party’s history in the state.

“I don’t want to misspeak here,” he told reporters after a rally in Keene, N.H. “But it may be the case that some delegates were selected based on a flip of a coin. Not the best way to do democracy.”

Concern about voter fraud was raised late Monday night when C-SPAN posted a video that showed a Polk County caucus chair and a Clinton precinct captain did not conduct an actual count of the caucusgoers. Results were also slow to come in with about 5% of the precincts (roughly 90 sites) going unreported at the time Clinton and Sanders addressed their Iowa supporters.

Iowa caucus coin flip count unknown

The party didn’t declare a winner in Monday’s caucuses until after 1 p.m. ET Tuesday. Clinton bested Sanders by less than half a percentage point.

Sanders said the campaign did “phenomenally well” in Iowa and continued to call it a “virtual tie.” He told a cheering crowd in Keene, N.H., that Iowa marked the beginning of his political revolution.

“Last night in Iowa we took on the most powerful political organization in this country,” he told the cheering crowd gathered at a theater. “Last night we came back from a 50-point deficit in the polls. Last night we began the political revolution, not just in Iowa, not just in New Hampshire, but all over this country.”

Then, Sanders quickly returned to his message about an economy that’s rigged in favor of the wealthy and maintained by a corrupt political system.

“Together we’ll create an economy that works for working families and not just the one percent,” he said. “Yes, Wall Street, you will have to pay more in taxes so our kids will get a good education.”

Sanders holds double-digit leads in New Hampshire, his neighboring state, and the cheering crowd of 1,166, with 125 in overflow, embraced his call for tackling climate change, offering free tuition at public colleges and providing workers with family and medical leave.

Sanders, downplaying expectations, noted to reporters that Clinton won the New Hampshire primary in 2008 and has “virtually the entire political establishment on her side.”

“We look forward to winning here but we take nothing, nothing for granted,” he said.

Contributing: Emilie Teresa Stigliani, Burlington Free Press

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