FIASCO IN THE IOWA CAUCUS

BERNIE SANDERS WOULD LEAD

The Democratic Party indeed announced in the evening to have had difficulties to collect the votes.

“We have identified inconsistencies in the reporting of several results (...).

It is simply a problem of escalation, our application did not crash, there was no intrusion or hacking, "assured the party.

It did not take less for the impatient Senator Bernie Sanders, herald of the left wing, to choose to disseminate his own results:

He claims to be leading the Iowa caucus with 29.66% of the vote, ahead of Pete Buttigieg who would have performed well with 24.59% of the votes.

Elizabeth Warren would come in third with 21.24% and Joe Biden far behind with only 12.37%.

This would represent a poor performance for those who have been leading the polls at the national level for months.

Of course, the senator specifies that these figures are not official and that they represent only 40% of the approximately 1,700 voting centers.

But "our supporters have worked too hard and too long to wait to see the results of their work", judges his campaign team.

Voters in this rural central US state did not participate in a regular, secret ballot primary, but in a caucus.

That is to say that each one expressed his vote publicly by placing himself physically - in some 1,700 rooms, schools or gymnasiums - behind the group of the candidate that he or she supported.

Supporters of those who did not cross the 15% threshold in the first round were then able to join one of the qualified candidates or abstain in a second round.

But the rules and IT tools for reporting results to the party were changed in 2020 and, it would seem, created a real shambles.

A shambles which risks aggravating the situation within the Democratic Party which is already experiencing many tensions.