The idea a year ago that Hillary Clinton would face a serious challenge within her party seemed implausible. | AP Photo Inside the Iowa caucus chaos How flip phones, socializing millennials and bad forecasting sowed confusion on election night.

George Ensley, head of Iowa’s Boone County Democrats, got a call around 1 a.m. Tuesday telling him that caucus results from one of his precincts was missing.

An elderly widow running the precinct had keyed in the final numbers via a new smartphone app created for the caucuses, sending the data back to party headquarters in Des Moines. She’d even gotten a reply message saying her tallies were received.


But now, as only a fraction of a percentage point separated Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, Ensley had to find a volunteer who could go to his precinct captain’s home in a rural area west of Ames to wake her up and get the paper record.

“It’s a good thing the people we sent out there she recognized. Let’s put it that way,” he chuckled. “She was not a happy camper.”

Technological breakdowns and reporting snafus were actually one of the many problems that plagued Monday’s Iowa Democratic caucus, according to POLITICO interviews with more than a dozen Democratic county chairmen and caucus workers from throughout the state, as well as party officials and campaign representatives.

They paint a picture of a state party that was wholly unprepared for the 171,517 Democratic voters who chose to participate, and failed to provide proper training for the hundreds of new volunteers expected to staff the caucuses. Multiple instances of unreported or miscalculated votes cast doubt and confusion on the results of a razor-thin race, the results of which continued to change over the course of the week.

Much of the blame for the Iowa chaos is being laid at the feet of the state Democratic party and its leader, Andrea McGuire, who took over the organization last January amid concerns about a potential conflict of interest because of well-publicized ties to Clinton, including an “HRC 2016” vanity license plate that was once affixed to her Buick. McGuire declined to comment to POLITICO, but has insisted that the caucus was not mishandled even as she has acknowledged Sunday that she will commission a review.

Of course, the idea a year ago that Clinton would face a serious challenge within her party also seemed implausible. Democrats were having no luck drafting Elizabeth Warren or Vice President Joe Biden into the race. And the notion that tens of thousands of Iowans would “feel the Bern” wouldn’t become real until months later.

But interviews with officials across the state indicate that the party didn’t adjust even as the profile of the campaign changed dramatically over the months leading up to the vote. They might have been misled by wildly inaccurate pre-caucus polls, showing Clinton on several occasions with commanding double digit leads, but the result was disarray across the state’s 99 counties. There weren’t enough forms on hand to register so many new voters. Last-minute volunteers hadn’t been well trained to administer the caucus’s arcane procedures. Microsoft’s new app, which was intended to make reporting results easier, was cast aside by many precincts in favor of old-fashioned landlines. And as Ensley found out, results from numerous precincts weren’t reported at all, forcing party officials to track down their caucus captains in the middle of the night.

“If we had a little bit of chaos in this county, with these 16 precincts, I can’t imagine how it would be at the state level with 1,600 precincts. Holy cow,” Ensley said.

Democrats across Iowa said in interviews after last week’s caucus that some of the problems that hounded the state’s unique selection process may have even inadvertently benefited Clinton. After all, her campaign was relying on a more experienced group of supporters who better understood the complex caucus procedures, such as the need to convince supporters of Martin O’Malley to realign with another campaign once their candidate failed to qualify for a second round of balloting.

“There’s a number of issues which show at best unpreparedness and at worst incompetence and that ultimately put a finger on the scale for” Clinton, said one veteran of Iowa Democratic politics who supported the former secretary of state’s campaign.

A Democratic staffer from one of the 2016 presidential campaigns said “the root cause” for Monday night’s disarray “was the complete mess that was the Iowa Democratic party this year, and the ways in which they were simply not ready for the caucuses, completely unprepared for the possibility of higher turnout, still changing locations up until the day of, and how that could have impacted the confidence in the results.”

“It's not from malice or from any real effort to sway the results one way or the other from the party people,” this source added, “but for many reasons we've heard this was the worst organized caucus process in decades and that certainly contributed to some of the confusion and the lack of confidence.”

The state’s largest newspaper the Des Moines Register, has called for a “complete audit” of the caucus, complaining on its editorial page that “something smells in the Democratic party.” Others are asking whether Iowa’s unique preference system can even deliver the kind of uncontested and transparent results required for such a high-stakes opening moment in the presidential election season.

“It’s folly to look at this and say this was done as well as it could have been done,” said Pete D’Alessandro, Sanders’ Iowa campaign chief.

Added the long-time Iowa Democratic operative: “If we’re going to have first in the nation status we have to be on top of our game otherwise we’re not right to be trusted with this responsibility.”

***

Iowa Democrats had some similar problems the last time they ran a competitive caucus – they just got lucky the results were nowhere near as close.

In early January 2008, an all-time state record of about 240,000 Democrats turned out to help springboard Barack Obama to the White House. Waves of young, new voters waited in long lines to fill out registration forms, rooms were overcrowded and volunteers nervous about speaking in front of large crowds had to direct traffic and corral their neighbors in order to tally a winner. Since the final results weren’t that tight – Obama beat both John Edwards and Clinton by about 8 percent – several Iowa Democrats said post-mortem calls from inside the party to better prepare for the next caucus failed to generate momentum.

With Obama running uncontested for reelection in 2012, the state party conducted only a nominal “pep rally” caucus four years ago. So the dust settled even thicker on the internal memos that had urged better preparations. Instead it was the Republicans who struggled to produce a clear victor. More than two weeks passed before GOP party officials announced that Rick Santorum had in fact edged out Mitt Romney, who had originally been declared the caucus winner and had gone on to win handily in New Hampshire seven days later.

This cycle, Iowa’s Democrats planned their caucuses based on a much different race than the one they ended up getting. Initial turnout models predicted between 60,000 and 70,000 people showing up if the choice was just between Clinton and Martin O’Malley. By the time Sanders declared his candidacy at the end of April 2015, polls in Iowa showed him as far as 54 points behind Clinton. Polls narrowed in the fall to a tie, before Clinton reopened large leads later in the year and then Sanders surged back again earlier this year.

But signs were emerging from the field of looming problems. Party leaders across the state were complaining to state headquarters that they weren’t getting enough information about what to do as the caucus date approached. Last November, the Guardian picked up on the unease, though McGuire said she was confident everything would be fine come caucus day. “We’ve done lots of training already and will continue to do training,” she said then. “Everyone feels comfortable.”

By mid-January, things were still not looking so good. Time reported that Democrats were 200 temporary chairs short of what they needed to administer the caucuses in all 1,681 precincts.

Several Democratic county party leaders said they were bracing for problems because caucus locations had been reserved when Clinton was way ahead in the polls and smaller spaces looked like they would suffice. “It didn’t look like it’d be that competitive,” said Bret Nilles, chair of the Linn County party. As Sanders’ campaign surged, though, he said he scrambled without much luck to locate new caucus sites but ran into conflicts like school gyms that already had basketball games scheduled. Then on caucus night, he said he struggled to track down 1,500 registration forms for all the new voters who showed up.

“We had 62 wards and precincts. They were all packed. So what do you expect?” said Pat Sass, the Democrat in charge of Black Hawk County who on Friday afternoon – four days after the voting - explained that she was “still working through our packets. We’ve got a lot of results. We’re putting things together to mail to the auditor, to the state party.”

Democrats in Hancock County mistakenly sent in their results Monday night awarding Sanders one less county delegate than he had actually won. The mistake came in a precinct in the county seat of Garner when only one Democrat showed up to caucus at the site. The man, a Sanders supporter, filled out the proper paperwork but no one called it in. “They thought he left without filling anything out,” said the county chairman, Gary Gelner. He said he discovered the error mid-week on the state party’s official website “and got it all straightened out in a matter of minutes.”

A similar error happened in Woodbury County involving just one person showing up to caucus in his precinct. But in this instance, the results weren't lost — they were mistakenly added to Clinton’s total county delegate haul.

Elsewhere, state Democratic officials questioned the math of the local precinct chair and erroneously changed the results from a Grinnell College caucus site — taking away one Poweshiek County delegate that should have gone to Sanders and instead adding it to Clinton’s totals. That mistake was included among five that the state Democratic party agreed to correct after a partial audit released Sunday, which ultimately still left Clinton as the overall winner in Iowa.



In Linn County, four precinct chairs were frustrated when the totals they sent into the state party headquarters didn’t go through and several hours elapsed before it was resolved. Organizers in several precincts described confusion when people from adjacent caucus sites wandered into their areas during the proceedings to socialize, throwing off the overall counts.

For many, the new, much-hyped Microsoft technology was a big part of the problem. Party officials would only say that a “majority” of the precincts used the app and that they were never expecting it to win complete acceptance across the state. Anecdotally, several Democratic county chairs said their older volunteers had little interest in using the technology. Precinct leaders who didn’t own cell phones with the capability to download the app were only more confused when state party officials recommended they borrow an Android or iPhone from a friend. “That just went right over their heads,” Nilles said.

“As far as I’m concerned anything that has to do with the Internet could be hacked,” said Gelner, who added that he called in his results via the Iowa’s backup landline system.

“You go through the irritation of downloading the app, then you go through the irritation of trying to run the app, then you go through the irritation of trying to use the app, or on the night of the caucus you make a phone call, answer three questions and you’re done,” said Stephen Hanson, the chair of the Iowa County Democratic party. “Technology is a wonderful thing, but it’s not always the best solution.”

Sanders’ campaign questioned the Microsoft app before the caucus, and D’Alessandro reiterated his criticism after Monday’s failures.

“My point from the beginning is we didn’t have the margin of error for a glitch,” he said. “We had to be precise. No one believed it would be close, but it was. Glitches aren’t something that should be worked out in real time.”

***

While the candidates say they’re focusing on Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, the debate back in Iowa is far from over.

The final results changed on Sunday after McGuire’s office released an initial review of 14 precincts brought to its attention by the campaigns, finding five errors, including the misplaced Sanders delegates from Woodbury and Poweshiek counties. Clinton remains the declared winner of the initial phase of the caucuses, though her overall lead has shrunk to 0.25 percent, from 0.27 percent.

Sanders campaign says it will continue checking with its precinct leaders for other inconsistencies. And it will continue to raise its concerns through the spring and summer as the process works its way through district, county and state conventions that will take place outside the national media spotlight and ultimately determine how to award delegates for the Democratic National Convention in late July in Philadelphia.

An Iowa Democratic party spokesman interviewed Sunday insisted that the state and its array of volunteers were well prepared for the challenges on caucus night. He noted that the phone lines were there as a backup to the Microsoft app. The party sent out 75,000 voter registration forms, relying on data from 2008 to guide direct where to distribute them. And the party also added several new features this year for its caucus to expand participation, including allowing military personnel and their families, Peace Corps volunteers and Iowa students living abroad to call in for a tele-caucus.

But McGuire, the state Democratic party chief, also acknowledged Sunday that she would open a committee review “to ensure we can improve our caucus process while preserving what makes it special.”

Still, there’s frustration across the state, especially in the capital, which has benefited from a recent run of positive coverage for its burgeoning cosmopolitan vibe. As the national media sprinted east to New Hampshire, the Des Moines Register called for McGuire to release the raw vote totals and conduct a full audit of the results.

Sanders’ campaign has also called for the release of the Iowa raw vote totals – a demand that has been tried without success in the past by news media, academics and supporters of previous losing campaigns, including Clinton’s in 2008 and Howard Dean’s in 2004.

Long-time caucus observers note that there’s not a very good paper trail that keeps tabs on the actual final vote counts; more important for their process is a complex formula that arrives at the state delegate equivalents. And there’s another reason the state’s Democrats tabulate their caucus results without the benefit of voting machines. They must abide by a decades-old agreement with New Hampshire that allows it to hold the nation’s first primary.

D’Alessandro said his main grievance with McGuire and the state Democratic party came around 2:30 a.m. local time Tuesday when it released caucus results declaring Clinton the winner before it had a chance to do a more careful review of the paper record.

“The finger that was put on the scale was when they released the results too early,” he said.

Some Iowa Democrats agree that the party moved too fast in calling the race considering the number of inconsistencies that had piled up. Some blamed the national and local news media for putting pressure on the state party. Others blamed the candidates – Democratic sources from the campaigns were telling reporters before 9 p.m. local time that Clinton would win by two to three percentage points.

“I think it’s more important to be right than to be fast,” Ensley said.

Richard Bender, a former staffer to then-Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin who helped write the state’s caucus rules, said in an email the vote count to him looked “very solid” throughout the night. He was in the state party’s counting room last Monday – he’s been there for every competitive caucus since 1972 – and he said he wasn’t aware of any errors. The Clinton, Sanders and O’Malley campaigns also had their own reporting systems “and would have DEFINITELY told the party if there was a dispute,” he wrote in an email.

“The Iowa party is only guilty of having a close result,” he said.

Sanders himself during Thursday’s debate downplayed the problems with the caucus process. “I agree with the Des Moines Register, but let’s not blow this out of proportion,” Sanders said last week during the debate. “This is not like a winner-take-all thing. I think where we now stand, correct me if I’m wrong, you have 22 delegates. I have 20 delegates. We need 2,500 delegates to win the nomination. This is not the biggest deal in the world.”

Asked by the debate moderators if she supported a state party audit of the caucus results, Clinton replied, “Whatever they decide to do, that's fine.” The next morning, Clinton’s Iowa director published a post on Medium titled “Hillary won. End of story” that questioned why Sanders’ campaign was advancing “conspiracy theories” about the misreported caucus results that he argued wouldn’t change the outcome.

Several other Iowa Democrats insisted the caucus process did what it was supposed to -- help winnow down the field before it moves on to New Hampshire.

“It’s not a precise process. It’s an open process where people do what they can,” Hanson said. “It’s antiquated. It’s weird. It’s also pretty effective.”

Considering the caucus process continues with a county convention March 12 and then district and state-level meetings in April and June, many Iowans also wonder why there’s even so much fighting over who actually “won” Iowa.

“Putting so much stock in these numbers,” said Gelner, “is a little bit hokey.”

