WASHINGTON/MANCHESTER (New Hampshire) • Mr Pete Buttigieg has narrowly won Iowa's Democratic presidential caucuses, after a long delay in releasing the results of the first contest in the race to pick a challenger to Republican President Donald Trump.
Mr Buttigieg, the moderate 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, edged out progressive Senator Bernie Sanders by 26.2 per cent to 26.1 per cent of state-delegate equivalents - the data traditionally used to determine the winner - with 100 per cent of precincts counted, the Iowa Democratic Party said on Thursday.
Senator Elizabeth Warren finished third with 18 per cent, while former vice-president Joe Biden limped to a disappointing fourth place with 15.8 per cent. Senator Amy Klobuchar finished fifth with 12.3 per cent.
The results, which have been marred by technical and organisational errors, could reshape the 2020 race for the Democratic presidential nomination for November's election and raise doubts about the future of Mr Biden, the one-time front runner.
Iowa Democrats had poured into 1,600 schools, community centres and other public locations on Monday night to make their choices among the 11 candidates in the Democratic race.
But the Democratic candidates had already departed from Iowa and turned their attention to the next nominating contest in New Hampshire - to take place next Tuesday - before the first results were even released in two batches on Tuesday.
Officials blamed inconsistencies related to a new mobile app used for vote counting for the unusual delay in Iowa, the state that traditionally kicks off a presidential election campaign that culminates this year on Nov 3.
Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez called on Thursday for an audit of the Iowa caucuses after the technical glitch created uncertainty about the accuracy of the tally.
"I want to make sure every Iowa voter knows that their vote was counted," Mr Perez said in an interview with MSNBC.
He said any review was unlikely to change the composition of the state's 41 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
Iowa Democratic Party leader Troy Price said the local party did not plan to start an immediate audit and it would do so only if a candidate asked for one.
Mr Sanders, when asked at a CNN event if he would request a re-canvass, said: "We've got enough of Iowa. I think we should move on to New Hampshire."
Party officials initially attributed the delays to a technical problem with the new mobile app, but other concerns have since emerged, complicating efforts to release the final tallies.
The Iowa Democratic Party received an "unusually high volume of inbound calls" to its caucus hotline on Monday night from "callers who would hang up immediately after being connected, supporters of Mr Trump who called to express their displeasure with the Democratic Party, and Iowans looking to confirm details", a party official said.
The call volume was "highly irregular" compared with during previous caucuses, the official said.
According to the New York Times, more than 100 precincts reported results that were inconsistent, had missing data or were not possible under the caucus rules, casting doubt on the count.
After Iowa's reporting issues and delays, the Nevada Democratic Party, which hosts its caucus on Feb 22, is "scrapping both the app and ties to Shadow", the company that developed caucus-reporting apps for both Iowa and Nevada, party spokesman Molly Forgey said.
"Luckily for us, we had a series of backup plans in place," she added.
REUTERS
