Virtual tie in Iowa, but national Democrats to recanvass

The chairman of the Democratic National Committee called for a recanvass of the Iowa caucuses Thursday after a software glitch created inconsistencies in the vote count.

"Enough is enough," tweeted DNC Chairman Tom Perez. "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."

Primary elections are run by local and state election officials, but caucuses are run by state parties using volunteers. In a contested vote, a recanvass typically occurs prior to a full recount of all votes and is a less thorough review of the results.

Troy Price, chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, said the party was prepared to do the recanvass — an audit of the paper records from each precinct caucus if requested by one of the candidates. As of Thursday, none had done so.

The completed results showed former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont separated by about a 10th of a percentage point in the total of "state delegate equivalents" — the measure state and national officials use to declare the winner and award delegates to the nominating convention to be held July 13-16 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

With 100 percent of the votes tallied, Buttigieg had 26.20 percent of delegate equivalents and Sanders had 26.13.

They were trailed by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts with 18 percent, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota with 16 percent and and former vice-president Joe Biden with 12 percent.

Andrew Yang was the only other candidate to capture a point, with 1 percent of the vote.

"The results released by the Iowa Democratic Party on Wednesday were riddled with inconsistencies and other flaws," The New York Times reported. "According to (an) analysis, more than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data or were not possible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses."

The newspaper said that in some cases vote tallies didn't add up, precincts allotted the wrong number of delegates to certain candidates and that in a "few cases" results reported by the Iowa Democratic Party didn't match those reported by the precincts, but added that, "The overall effect on the winner's margin may be small."

About 170,000 people participated in Monday's Iowa caucuses, down from 240,000 in 2008.

New Hampshire, the next contest for those seeking the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, is a primary state. The election will be held Feb 11. The candidates will debate in the state Friday at St. Anselm College in Manchester.