Oops! Iowa Democratic Party Updates Caucus Results, Summarily Issues ‘Minor Correction’

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The slow rollout of the Iowa Democratic caucus numbers has hit a teensy bit of a snag.

To review: yesterday the state party released 62 percent of the overall results, saying those were the only numbers they could verify and would be releasing more as they could verify more of the raw data.

As of this posting, 86 percent of the vote is in, but not without some, well, hiccups.

After the most recent batch of results came out, people noticed something was off and indeed the IDP confirmed they needed to make a “minor correction”:

There will be a minor correction to the last batch of results and we will be pushing an update momentarily.

— Iowa Democrats (@iowademocrats) February 5, 2020

So yeah, it’s going well.

Apparently, per the Des Moines Register, there was an error that confused votes for Bernie Sanders for votes for Deval Patrick:

In the first batch of results released Wednesday afternoon, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick suddenly had earned 21 state delegate equivalents even though he had spent very little time campaigning in Iowa. The party’s website said 1,677 people supported him on the first alignment and 1,768 people did so in the final alignment…

In Des Moines’ 55th precinct caucus, which was held in the lobby of Capital Square a downtown office building and is also home to the Des Moines Register, the party’s Wedneday afternoon results, before the correction, showed Patrick earning the support of 191 people in the first alignment and 218 in the final alignment. Those numbers actually belonged to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

The numbers reported by the party also showed Steyer earning the support that actually belonged to Warren. And no support was tallied for Yang or “uncommitted,” though there were some supporters in the room.

The New York Times forecast currently has Pete Buttigieg as the expected winner, followed by Bernie Sanders.