Joe Scarborough marveled over the chaos of Monday evening’s Iowa caucus, asking: “What is wrong with the Iowa Democratic party?”
“Does anybody know what actually happened?” Scarborough asked on Tuesday morning as he and a “Morning Joe” panel reviewed the previous night’s delay, which led to confusion and speculation for hours Monday night.
Vaughn Hillyard, an NBC News reporter who’s been covering Iowa for five years, gave the panelists on the MSNBC morning show a rundown, explaining that the state’s Democratic party had a brief press call in the early hours of Tuesday morning and South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg prematurely declared a victory. The results of the caucus, which is the first major contest in the election cycle, are still unknown.
Approximately an hour into the delay on Monday, the Iowa Democratic Party finally produced an explanation: that the hold-up was a matter of due diligence rather than technical malfunction or criminal activity.
“We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results. In addition to the tech systems being used to tabulate results, we are also using photos of results and a paper trail to validate all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report,” IDP communications director Mandy McClure said in a statement.
“This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and we will simply take time to further report the results,” the statement continued.
When Hillyard concluded his explanation of the night’s wild events, Scarborough questioned what’s “wrong” with the state’s party before moving on, like the Democratic candidates for president, to focus on the upcoming New Hampshire primary.