A History of Vote Counting on Iowa Caucus Night

The most-watched early presidential contest in America has been a hot mess for more than a decade.

My first Iowa caucus night was in 2012. The Republican Party of Iowa declared Mitt Romney the winner by a mere eight votes over Rick Santorum, giving Romney a boost of momentum that eventually carried him to the nomination.

By the next morning, Santorum’s underdog campaign was hearing from county chairmen about miscounts. The state party ultimately retracted its call — Santorum had actually won by 34 votes — but not for more than two weeks.

“I pulled off a miracle, but they said Romney was the winner,” Santorum said when I called him this week. “It wasn’t, ‘Santorum came from nowhere.’ It was ‘Romney won, the race is over.’ What do you think the result would have been if they said I had won?”

The 2012 debacle was the first of three consecutive botched Iowa caucus nights. On Monday, the state’s Republican caucuses will once again be run by party volunteers at 1,657 caucus sites.

Local officials have repeatedly failed to meet the basic accounting standards Americans are accustomed to on election nights. And the kickoff contest for a 2024 election cycle that both major parties agree will decide the fate of American democracy is being hosted by a state with a history of fumbling the basic task of Democracy 101: accurately counting the votes.

Unlike primary and general elections operated on a regular basis by professionals, the Iowa way is to have regular people carry out the count. And it has not gone well.

In 2016, the race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton was so close both said they won, and each had a legitimate case. The Sanders campaign said he had earned the most votes, while Clinton won the most delegates. The Iowa Democratic Party’s reporting process had no way to verify how many people had voted for each candidate.

Then came 2020 and the mother of all Iowa meltdowns. The caucus reporting mechanism failed, phones were overloaded at the Iowa Democratic headquarters and at the end of the night and into the next day, nobody knew who had won.

It took until the end of the week for it to become clear that Pete Buttigieg had won the most Iowa delegates. Instead of news cycles about his victory, the stories were about the logistical disaster.

“Iowa doesn’t have a great track record of getting people timely and accurate results and probably no one suffered from that more than Pete Buttigieg in 2020,” said Lis Smith, who was a senior aide for the Buttigieg campaign.

In the aftermath, the Democratic Party under Joe Biden pulled the state’s first-in-line status. As I reported this morning, Iowa’s Democrats have meekly accepted their fate as primary season also-rans.

Now I’m back in cold and snowy Des Moines for a caucus where the biggest question is who will finish in second place behind former President Donald J. Trump. But the thing I’m most curious about is whether we’ll even know if there will be accurate — or any — results on Monday night.

Iowa’s Republicans are feeling confident in their ability to count and report results in a timely fashion. During a videoconference with reporters last week, party officials said they had tested their reporting system and were confident there would be no repeat of the Democrats’ 2020 meltdown.

“Short of a complete collapse of the worldwide internet, we should not have a problem with the data feed,” said Patrick Stewart, a veteran Iowa Republican who helped the party build its 2024 caucus results reporting system.

And whatever the results on Monday, Republican Party of Iowa officials said they won’t be declaring a winner — they’ll leave that to the news media.

Our boy without a bus

My Times colleague Michael Gold drew the assignment to follow Donald Trump and his 2024 campaign around the country. And the era of campaign buses is over: Candidates often use private planes and reporters drive rental cars. Michael has driven more than 1,000 miles in the past week, surviving a flat tire and many hours of looking out the window at barren cornfields.

I called Michael this morning to ask what his travels have taught him.

So, what have you learned about Iowa driving across it so many times?

The towns and cities have character and the people are good-natured and helpful, especially when you get a flat tire. But it’s vast — when you drive across the state and there’s nothing growing in the fields, the landscape can be incredibly bleak.

Is that a metaphor for what it’s like to cover this year’s Republican primary?

I’m not going to say that.

What have you learned about Trump and his Iowa supporters in all your trips here?

His supporters are devoted to him. They’re willing to wait hours for him in all kinds of bad weather. He was three and a half hours late on Saturday.

Three and a half hours!

He had plane issues. People waited. The gym was still packed and there were still people in the overflow room. That’s the kind of devotion he’s inspiring in people. They’re there to see him. They’ll drive across the state to see him. There’s just no other candidate who has that devotion.

Watch this tonight

It’s a split-screen moment for Republicans in Iowa.

A Fox News town hall with Donald Trump will go head-to-head with a debate on CNN between Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. Trump, the race’s front-runner, qualified for the debate but has again opted to engage in counterprogramming in hopes of derailing the appearances of his rivals.

Impeachment: Republicans began formal hearings against the homeland security secretary without any evidence of high crimes.

R.I.P.: Amalija Knavs, the mother of the former first lady Melania Trump, died at age 78.

The Scan

• Representative Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican who used a congressional hearing to tear into college presidents over antisemitism, announced her best-ever quarter of fund-raising.

• Bosses in the Biden administration are being pressed over young staffers’ anonymous letters, Politico reports.

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign was questioned by the Federal Election Commission over payments to his daughter-in-law, CNBC reports.

• The Oregon Supreme Court could be next to rule on Trump’s eligibility for the ballot under the 14th Amendment, CNN reports.