Iowa caucuses 2020 live updates: First set of Iowa Democratic caucus results shows Sanders and Buttigieg leading

But he said he understands why people are upset with the app, and upset with the Iowa Democratic Party.Asked about the future of the Iowa caucuses, Deeth was blunt: “I think we’re done.”DES MOINES — Sanders said Tuesday that he felt he was in “pretty good shape” based on his campaign’s tally of caucus results, but stopped short of declaring victory and suggested that Buttigieg prematurely portrayed himself as the winner.“I don’t know how anybody declares victory before you have an official statement as to the election results,” Sanders told reporters before taking off for New Hampshire. Weaver said the tally, which the campaign said was based on 60 percent of anticipated precincts, showed Sanders leading on the first and second alignments.He did not specify the campaign’s projected state delegate total, another key metric in the caucus results.Sanders said it was disappointing that state party officials had not provided a timelier count.“I can’t understand why that happens, but it has happened,” Sanders told reporters on his campaign plane, calling the party “negligent.” He added, “This was not a good night for democracy.”Asked about a letter from Biden’s campaign arguing that there were major flaws in the caucus tallying system, Sanders said, “I don’t want to speculate.”But he later said it was “unfair” to cast aspersions on the results. To let it sink in, she paused, and just added: “Wow.”Warren told the crowd that she was in a “tight, three-way race at the top” and that “the three of us will be dividing up most of the delegates coming out of Iowa.”She did not specify who those three candidates were, though her campaign manager, Roger Lau, had the night before told reporters their internal data showed Warren, Sanders and Buttigieg clustered together, with Biden “a distant fourth.”Warren also said the difficulties coming out of the first nomination contest in the Democratic calendar are discouraging.“We had a bumpy start to the Democratic process yesterday in Iowa,” Warren told the crowd of about 500 people who came to see her in a theater here.She added to that list that Trump will in the spotlight Tuesday night when he delivers the State of the Union address and acknowledged that the Senate impeachment trial will probaby end with an acquittal of Trump.“These are hard times for our country,” Warren said. — Biden began his Tuesday event in New Hampshire by opining on the still-undecided caucuses in Iowa.“We think we’re going to come out of (Iowa) really doing well, but be careful what you say, because it’s not done yet,” he told a standing-room-only crowd of about 200.“We don’t know precisely how many votes we had, but I feel really good about getting more than my fair share.”Hours earlier, Biden’s campaign had blasted the Iowa Democratic Party for its handling of Monday night’s caucus.“We believe that the campaigns deserve full explanations and relevant information regarding the methods of quality control you are employing, and an opportunity to respond, before any official results are released,” his campaign said in a statement to the party.Sen. Mark R. “We have enough problems with the Russians and other foreign actors trying to destroy Americans’ trust in our elections — we don’t need to add fuel to the fires of those efforts.”Earlier Tuesday, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman of the committee, expressed a similar assurance that there was no foul play involved.“We’re confident there was no outside interference in their system, and I’m sure the party in Iowa will figure out where their glitches were,” Burr told reporters.The Nevada Democratic Party said Tuesday that it will not use the app at the center of the technical difficulties causing delayed results in Iowa’s caucuses.“NV Dems can confidently say that what happened in the Iowa caucus last night will not happen in Nevada on February 22nd,” the state party’s chairman, William McCurdy II, said in a statement. Representatives for the firm didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.The Iowa Democratic Party plans to release results from the caucuses late Tuesday afternoon, officials said.In a call with campaign aides, state party leaders said they would aim to release “50 percent of all results” starting at 5 p.m. Tuesday, according to audio of the call shared with The Washington Post.A representative for the Buttigieg campaign sounded pleased, while a representative for the Biden campaign sounded frustrated, pressing state party leaders to wait until all of the results could be verified before beginning to release them, according to audio of the call.“The problems are just multiplying,” said Dana Remus, the general counsel for the Biden campaign. Technical problems have so far prevented the state from declaring a winner, and former vice president Joe Biden, the polling leader, is unlikely to win first place, according to data tracked by multiple campaigns.The Iowa Democratic Party plans to announce the results of the caucuses at 5 p.m. on Tuesday.“This is the best-case scenario,” Bloomberg senior adviser Howard Wolfson said of the confusing Iowa caucuses results. Meanwhile, we are taking the fight to Trump every day.”Since entering the race in November, Bloomberg has spent more than $300 million on television and digital advertising, according to Ad Analytics, an ad tracking firm.By comparison, Sanders spent $11 million on television and radio ads in Iowa during the entire caucus campaign, while Buttigieg spent $10.3 million.Bloomberg’s advisers have also been cheered in recent days by President Trump’s continued desire to engage directly with Bloomberg, a businessman worth more than $50 billion.Both men ran ads during Sunday’s Super Bowl, and in a pregame interview Trump made light of Bloomberg’s physical stature, suggesting that he would want to stand on a box at a debate.“I stand twice as tall as he does on the stage, the stage that matters,” Bloomberg responded to Trump.Bloomberg told a noontime crowd in Detroit Tuesday that he was sleeping on a plane last night when he awoke and asked an aide about the results in Iowa.“The guy said, ‘Nothing.’ ”“I still can’t figure out what happened,” he said to laughter, before adding: “More than any other candidate, we have the momentum.”DES MOINES — The Iowa Democratic Party is dispatching staff Tuesday to collect boxes of presidential preference cards — which record the votes of caucus-goers — in counties across the state, seeking to shore up its paper trail as confusion persists about the nature of the results.In Scott County, in eastern Iowa, volunteers were up until 3 a.m. calling in the results to the state party after widespread technical failures. The face-to-face retail politics nature of Iowa’s caucus system also encourages dialogue between candidates and voters that makes our presidential candidates accountable for the positions they take and the records they hold,” the statement said.Grassley, Ernst and Reynolds’s statement also said Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status “has the full backing of President Trump.” Trump tweeted Tuesday that the issues with reporting were not the fault of Iowa but rather the fault of the Democratic Party.“We look forward to Iowa carrying on its bipartisan legacy of service in the presidential nominating process.”In a statement released this morning, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price said caucus results would be released “as soon as possible today.”Price said issues with the app caused the delay. The application’s reporting issue did not impact the ability of precinct chairs to report data accurately,” he said.On Monday night, precinct captains across the state reported widespread problems with the app, with users saying they were unable to submit information even after hours of trying.Price said state officials are checking app data against paper documentation, and that precinct-level results are still being reported to the IDP.“While our plan is to release results as soon as possible today, our ultimate goal is to ensure that the integrity and accuracy of the process continues to be upheld,” he said.Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told Fox News that the Department offered to test the app for hacking before the caucuses.“Our cybersecurity and infrastructure security agencies offered to test that app from a hacking perspective, they declined,” Wolf said Tuesday.“We don’t see any malicious cyber activity going on,” Wolf said. Unfortunately, the caucus system is not.”Howard Dean, a former presidential candidate and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said “basically yes” when asked Tuesday if Iowa should lose its first-in-the-nation status.During an appearance on CNN, however, Dean suggested the major problem with Iowa going first is its lack of diversity.“They’ve got to be matched on the same day with states that are more diverse,” Dean said, adding that large states should not be early in the order.Dean said Iowa party officials had acted appropriately in delaying the release of the results.“They did the right thing. “It’s just not a good system.”Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said during a television interview Tuesday that her team has “real concerns about the integrity of the process” and stressed that “no official data” has been released on the caucuses’ results.Her comments came shortly after the Buttigieg campaign sent a memo to reporters detailing its precinct-level data from Monday night in Iowa.“There’s no official data that has been presented yet,” Bedingfield said during an appearance on CNN, cautioning that partial data doesn’t “paint a full picture.”She said that “we feel great about our performance last night,” but declined to answer a question about where the campaign thinks Biden finished in the caucuses.The Biden campaign on Tuesday unveiled seven endorsements from officials in early voting, Super Tuesday and battleground states, claiming they were “a sign of strength” following the Iowa caucuses.The Democratic officials include California Secretary of State Alex Padilla; Roanoke, Va., Mayor Sherman Lea; Talladega, Ala., Mayor Timothy Ragland; former senator Mark Pryor (Ark.); former senator David Pryor (Ark.); former South Carolina governor Jim Hodges; former South Carolina first lady Rachel Hodges.CONCORD, N.H. By all indications, we are going to New Hampshire victorious.”At the time, no results had been released, but a night that his campaign began with stoic confidence went better than it said it had hoped.Buttigieg will campaign with Donchess, his latest endorser, on Tuesday morning as part of an eight-stop day in New Hampshire.President Trump weighed in on the delayed results in Iowa on Tuesday morning, calling the Democratic caucuses “an unmitigated disaster.”“Nothing works, just like they ran the Country,” he said in a tweet that was critical of the cost of the launch of the website offering insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act.“The only person that can claim a very big victory in Iowa last night is ‘Trump,’ ” Trump wrote.He easily prevailed in the Republican caucuses, winning about 97 percent support against former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld and former congressman Joe Walsh of Illinois.MANCHESTER, N.H. The party officials told the campaigns that they planned to release caucus results later on Tuesday and that they are hand-checking results, according to a person on the call.A second person on the call said Sanders senior adviser Jeff Weaver got into a tense exchange with Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price.Sean Bagniewski, chair of the Polk County Democratic Party, said that local officials were aware of problems with the app since last Thursday and that they had requested state officials resolve the problems — to no avail.“We knew the app was a problem last Thursday,” Bagniewski said.When local party officials asked the state party about issues they had with the app, they were referred to a “dedicated staffer” who was not able to solve the problems, he said.“We had had so many complaints about the app that we started telling our chairs that if they were having problems with the app then you should call in the results,” Bagniewski said.The state party did not provide any training on how to use the app, he said, adding that while the caucus trainings are done at the county level, the app itself came from the state level.Local officials had trouble downloading the app, getting a PIN to log in, and activating it even when they had a PIN, Bagniewski said.Then, when precinct chairmen tried to call the results in via the hotline, they were placed on hold for as long as two hours, he said.“When our chairs are calling, it’s a wait time of an hour and a half or two hours. … It is really really hard to wrap our heads around it.”In 2016, the Iowa Democratic Party didn’t release its final results until just before 1 p.m. the day after the caucuses, after hours of dueling narratives about the outcome.Around 3:30 a.m. on Feb. 2, 2016, the day after the caucuses, the party noted in an email sent to reporters that Hillary Clinton was leading Bernie Sanders by just over four state delegate equivalents, with just one final precinct in Des Moines outstanding.In those early hours after the caucuses, Sanders campaign officials were still saying they would contest the results and the Associated Press was refusing to formally call the closest Iowa caucuses in history.The state Democratic Party would later release the final results just before 1 p.m. confirming that Clinton was the first woman ever to win the Iowa caucuses by just under 4 state delegate equivalents.Sanders’s team lasting frustration with the process help spur many of the changes that were implemented this year, including the decision to release raw vote totals for the first time ever instead of solely relying on the complicated formula that yields state delegate equivalents. The campaign statement said it performed stronger in rural parts of the state than expected.His campaign said he reached viability in 83 percent of the caucuses that they got results for and that turnout was around 2016 levels — lower than records hit in 2008.The Sanders campaign said its results represented nearly 40 percent of precincts.“We recognize that this does not replace the full data from the Iowa Democratic Party, but we believe firmly that our supporters worked too hard for too long to have the results of that work delayed,” senior adviser Jeff Weaver said.According to the Sanders campaign results, Sanders performed best in the precincts they had, with about 29 percent of state delegate equivalents, followed by Buttigieg with 26 percent, Warren with 18 percent, Biden with 15 percent and Klobuchar with 11 percent.Warren strategist Joe Rospars criticized the release of numbers.Here’s what we know about what happened in Iowa:He also called the race “very close” between Warren, Sanders and Buttigieg and said Biden was “a distant fourth.”Polk County Democratic officials said they tried to deliver their results to the state party in person, after encountering problems with the new app they were supposed to use — but were turned away.Sean Bagniewski, chairman of the Polk County Democrats, said they initially decided the county’s 177 precinct chairs would call in results to the state party after encountering “issues” with a new reporting app.However, the state party hotline wasn’t working properly either, according to Bagniewski. “But we are built for the long haul.”Warren lingered in the room to take photos with her supporters before leaving to fly to New Hampshire, where she had a campaign event planned for Tuesday morning, her campaign said.Twitter will not require President Trump’s top political allies to delete tweets claiming that the Democratic caucus in Iowa is “rigged,” the tech company confirmed, raising fresh questions about its policies around voting.With official results delayed due to apparent technical troubles, Trump’s top supporters shared a series of tweets late Monday questioning the integrity of the voting process itself. On the site, users can’t mislead others about the date and time of an election, or the means by which they can vote, or Twitter will lock a person’s account until they delete the offending tweet.The policy also covers instances in which users share false or misleading information “relating to voters not being counted,” for example, as well as “misleading claims about voting procedures or techniques which could dissuade voters from participating.”The Biden campaign on Monday night emailed Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price and Executive Director Kevin Geiken raising concerns about “considerable flaws” in the caucus’s reporting system tonight.“The app that was intended to relay Caucus results to the Party failed; the Party’s back-up telephonic reporting system likewise has failed,” the campaign wrote in an email, obtained by The Washington Post. These acute failures are occurring statewide.”The Biden campaign requested state party leaders provide “full explanations and relevant information regarding the methods of quality control you are employing, and an opportunity to respond, before any official results are released.”Meanwhile, Biden rallied his supporters with an anti-Trump speech amid the delay in results Monday night, telling the crowd that “character is on the ballot,” and that Democrats must bring “compassion over cruelty” and “truth over lies.”“Folks, each and every one of us knows that deep in our bones that everything this nation stands for is at stake,” Biden said, speaking from the Biden campaign headquarters in Des Moines, with his wife Jill alongside him.Bruce Koeppl, a Biden volunteer and a precinct captain for Biden at the Knapp Center said he was frustrated by the results.“As an Iowa Democrat, it’s very disappointing,” he said. Giant projector screens behind him showed a live stream of CNN, as he voiced confident notes.“Inconsistencies” in reporting three sets of results has led to a lack of official numbers from the Iowa Democratic Party, more than three hours after Iowans started caucusing, officials said.Party leaders were supposed to report three sets of results from precincts Monday night: the original number of people who had aligned for a candidate, the numbers for each candidate upon realignment and the number of delegates awarded to each candidate.“We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results,” Iowa Democratic Party spokeswoman Mandy McClure said in a statement. He later spent more than an hour on hold trying to report his precinct results.Originally published at 11:34 p.m.Klobuchar addressed her supporters at the Des Moines Marriott Downtown, telling them that she’d earned her place in the next primaries even though she didn’t yet know the results of the Iowa caucuses.“We know there’s delays, but we know one thing — we are punching above our weight,” said Klobuchar, who was trailing the top four Democratic candidates but had moved up in the race’s final weeks.