It’s only one bad night, but it’s hard to imagine Iowa going worse for Democrats than it just did
But by Tuesday evening, it was evident something had gone badly wrong. A few hours after the caucus began, the state party issued a statement that said it was putting the election data through “quality control” out of an “abundance of caution.”
News reports throughout the night said an app implemented by the state Democratic Party had malfunctioned.‘s Elena Schneider quoted one Iowa Democratic source who said the party had resorted to paper data collection, adding: “The whole system largely broke.” Des Moines County Democratic Party Co-Chairman Tom Courtney told NPR: “Everyone’s having trouble calling in the results” and he would wait to call in his results until Tuesday morning.
Around that time the Iowa Democratic Party shed more light on what had gone wrong. A spokeswoman said in a statement that the party “found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results.” The spokeswoman added that the party was taking extra precautions, including photos of caucus tallies and other paper evidence, to validate that all results matched.
The glacial pace of the caucus reporting process and the use of the term “quality control” fueled efforts to delegitimize and undermine the integrity of the caucus process. Brad Parscale, President Trump’s reelection manager, seized on the state Democratic Party’s statements to sow doubt about the Democratic caucus outcome by tweeting: “Quality control=rigged?”