Iowa Democrats are still struggling to deliver definitive results from this week’s caucuses, marking a confusing beginning of the five-month process of picking a challenger to Republican president Donald Trump for November’s US election.
The partial results were released after confusion over delays in announcing the Monday’s caucus tallies due to a “coding issue” in an app which was used to report the data.
The head of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, called for an immediate “recanvass”, saying that the review would help “assure public confidence in the results”. “Enough is enough,” he tweeted.
According to the incomplete results, based on 97% of precincts reporting, Pete Buttigieg first held a narrow lead over US Senator Bernie Sanders. Later, it was announced that they are in a virtual tie, and have both won at least 11 national delegates, enough to have the most delegates at the party’s national congress.
US Senator Elizabeth Warren was third, while former vice president Joe Biden was in fourth place. However, media reported that over 100 precincts delivered results that were internally inconsistent or showed missing data.
The race will continue in New Hampshire next week. It will eventually go through all 50 US states and several territories to determine the Democratic presidential candidate.
