Iowa paper: Democrats should do caucus recount

The state party has so far refused to budge on the issue of further transparency and says that the current results will stand. For its part, Team Bernie is not formally contesting the results, though it says it is doing everything it can to double-check the official tallies with its Iowa staff. The campaign has also called for the state party to release the raw vote totals-something it typically has not done.

It gets sharper from there.

“What happened Monday night at the Democratic caucuses was a debacle, period”, wrote the paper’s board, which had formally endorsed Clinton ahead of the caucus.

Sam Lau, a spokesman for the Iowa Democratic party, only told the Guardian about the situation: “We had been made aware of the concerns in this precinct, and we are in the process of reviewing them with local party leadership. Their candidate, after all, is opposed by the party establishment – and wasn’t even a Democrat a few months ago”, the editorial board wrote. Head counts are converted to a proportional number of county convention delegates, which are then converted to “state delegate equivalents”, which then determine the win. Monday’s mess showed that it’s time for the Democrats to change, too.

“That being said, we are working with all campaigns on individual concerns they are bringing to us, and addressing them on a case-by-case basis”.

Clinton gave only a brief response to the question.

The precinct, which is the largest in the state had 925 caucus-goers and the Iowa Democratic party’s formula for apportioning delegates was not capable of fully dealing with circumstances in such a large precinct, he said.

The Sanders campaign is rechecking results on its own, going precinct by precinct, and is already finding inconsistencies, said Rania Batrice, a Sanders spokeswoman. “Senator Sanders is committed to the democratic process and believes we should do all we can to get a full picture and accurate numbers from Monday night”.

The episode echoes the events in 2012, when Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses became mired in confusion and created an embarrassment for the state following a similarly close race between former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. After the recount, eight precincts’ votes remained missing.

Democrats should ask themselves: What do we want the Iowa caucus to be?