The Iowa Democratic Party has now reported 100% of the results of Monday's Iowa presidential caucuses after a nightmarish delay — but it still might take even longer to determine an actual winner because of what look like errors in the data.

Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez called on the Iowa Democratic Party to "recanvass" the caucus results on Thursday morning. In practice, that would mean a hand audit of the papers used in each precinct to ensure the math calculating delegates is correct.

The Iowa Democratic Party indicated on Thursday that the party will only recanvass if a campaign formally requests the process. But news outlets, including NBC News, have already said they will not project a winner off of the data.

As the state party has continued to report results, some news outlets have found what they believe to be errors in the reporting of the extremely close results. Currently, Pete Buttigieg has an extremely narrow lead over Bernie Sanders in the delegate count — less than two delegates — in a virtual tie.

For the first time this year, the IDP released three sets of results. When you attend a Democratic caucus in Iowa, you select your candidate on the first vote. A caucus chair counts up everyone in the room. This is called the first alignment.



After that, if your candidate doesn’t meet 15% of the vote, you can pick another candidate, go home, or form an alliance with enough people who no longer have a viable candidate to hit 15%. Then the caucus chair counts again. That’s the final alignment.

The final alignment is used to determine delegates for the state convention and, ultimately, delegates for the national convention this summer. This is called the delegate equivalent.

Sanders, meanwhile, thanked Iowa for a resounding victory on Monday at a press conference in New Hampshire.

"This difference," Sanders added, "no matter who inches ahead in the end, is meaningless because we are both likely to receive the same number of national delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee."

Asked why he was claiming victory when Buttigieg has also claimed victory, Sanders said, "Because I got 6,000 more votes."

We're showing you the final alignment and the state delegate equivalent here. The data is still incomplete. So please be cautious with this data:

