Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez demanded a recanvassing of the Iowa caucuses Thursday four days after Iowa Democrats cast the first votes in the 2020 election without full results.
“Enough is enough,” Perez wrote on Twitter. “In light of the problems that have emerged in the implementation of the delegate selection plan and in order to assure public confidence in the results, I am calling on the Iowa Democratic Party to immediately begin a recanvass.”
Enough is enough. In light of the problems that have emerged in the implementation of the delegate selection plan and in order to assure public confidence in the results, I am calling on the Iowa Democratic Party to immediately begin a recanvass.
— Tom Perez (@TomPerez) February 6, 2020
Perez added in a follow-up tweet that the party would continue to report the results as they became available.
“A recanvass is a review of the worksheets from each caucus site to ensure accuracy,” Perez said. “The IDP will continue to report results.”
Perez’s demands come as the Iowa Democrats have yet to announce a winner in the first-in-the-nation contest state for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination eroding any benefits of winning in the caucus.
After candidates, campaigns, staff, and volunteers poured years of labor and dumped millions of dollars in the Hawkeye state, top-place finishers were robbed of the opportunity to showcase the strength of their efforts moving into the subsequent stages of the primary. Tuesday morning was the only news cycle with a chance to offer the candidates the glowing press coverage that comes with taking home a first-place finish. Instead, Tuesday saw headlines covering the disaster caucus rather than a candidate’s face and name appearing on every major newspaper in the country.
Four days later, the news cycle has moved onto President Donald Trump’s State of the Union, and the president’s acquittal of impeachment charges in the Senate landing the Democrats in disarray Trump claims a triumphant victory while Democrats conduct damage control.
The Iowa caucuses dismantled into chaos Monday night when the vote-reporting app used by volunteers crashed when vote totals began coming into the state party.
According to the New York Times, the app used had only recently been engineered in the past two months leading up to caucus day and had yet to be tested statewide. The app facilitating a critical election used to narrow the presidential field was also not vetted by the Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity agency and was sent to volunteers without any training on how to use the new technology.
ProPublica found on Wednesday that well-trained hackers could have easily compromised the integrity of the elections as the app lacked “key safeguards,” to protect it from intrusion.
The Iowa Democratic Party has said there is no evidence that the failures on Monday were a result of hacking.
As of Thursday afternoon, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg are neck-and-neck with 97 percent of precincts reporting, though Sanders won the popular vote in both rounds of voting.
Most candidates in the race declared a victor in Iowa regardless of the results. The next contest is the New Hampshire primary scheduled to take place on Tuesday.
