DNC chair calls for Iowa to 'immediately' recanvass after botched caucus
'Enough is enough,' Perez wrote in a tweet on Thursday.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez called on Iowa party officials to immediately recanvass Monday's caucus vote as confusion over the first-in-the-nation nominating contest dragged into the fourth day.
"Enough is enough," Perez wrote in a tweet on Thursday. "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."
A recanvass is essentially a second-check of the vote and would require the Iowa Democratic Party to review worksheets from each of the state's 1,681 precincts, Perez said.
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Late Wednesday night, the party was still releasing results, bringing the total to 97 percent of precincts reporting. The results showed a tight race between Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who had 26.2 percent of state delegates, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had 26.1.
IOWA CAUCUS CHAOS LINKED TO APP STARTED BY CLINTON CAMPAIGN VETERANS
Perez's proclamation is likely to inject more uncertainty in the caucuses, which have already been plagued by a buggy mobile phone app that forced the night to conclude without an apparent winner, as well as reports of inconsistencies and other flaws in the data.
According to a New York Times analysis, more than 100 precincts reported results that were “internally inconsistent," missing data or were impossible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses. In some cases, the Times reported, tallies did not add up, while in others, precincts are shown allotting the wrong number of delegates to certain candidates. Other times, the data provided by the state party do not match the same results released by the precinct.
The Times reported that there is no apparent bias in favor of either Sanders or Buttigieg.
State officials paid Shadow, a tech firm, more than $63,000 in two separate payments in November and December last year for "website development," according to state campaign finance records. Those payments were for the app the caucus site leaders were supposed to use to upload the results at their 1,765 precincts. But the system quickly broke down Monday night, requiring the party to enter data manually once it was clear there was an issue.
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Although Iowa Democratic officials said Wednesday that nearly all of the results of Monday’s caucuses will be released Thursday, a few precincts might remain outstanding,
“We are in the process of waiting for the mail to arrive,” said Troy Price, the party chairman, according to the Times. “Those final precincts may take a little bit for us to get those sheets.”