Iowa Democrats say ‘coding’ error led to caucus reporting debacle

ANKENY, Iowa — The chair of the Iowa Democrats said Tuesday the caucus reporting system broke down after a “coding issue” led to inconsistencies in counts and forced the data that was coming in from the more than 1,600 precincts to be logged in manually.

Troy Price, head of the state party, said the party plans to release the final results later in the day.

He said alarm bells went off Monday night when it “became clear there were inconsistencies with the reports” — triggering an “investigation” into what went wrong.

“As this investigation unfolded, IDP staff activated pre-planned backup measures and entered data manually,” Mr. Price said. “This took longer than expected.”

Mr. Price said that the state party found the app being used to collect the raw vote and delegate data from the precincts “was reporting out only partial data.”

“We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system,” Mr. Price said. “This issue was identified and fixed. The application’s reporting issue did not impact the ability of precinct chairs to report data accurately.”