A History of Vote Counting on Iowa Caucus Night

The closely-watched contest has been a hot mess for more than a decade.

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Vote counting during the 2012 Republican presidential caucus in Clive, Iowa.

The most-watched early presidential contest in America has been a hot mess for more than a decade.

My first Iowa caucus night was in 2012. The Republican Party of Iowa declared Mitt Romney the winner by a mere eight votes over Rick Santorum, giving Romney a boost of momentum that eventually carried him to the nomination.

By the next morning, Santorum’s underdog campaign was hearing from county chairmen about miscounts. The state party ultimately retracted its call — Santorum had actually won by 34 votes — but not for more than two weeks.

“I pulled off a miracle, but they said Romney was the winner,” Santorum said when I called him this week. “It wasn’t, ‘Santorum came from nowhere.’ It was ‘Romney won, the race is over.’ What do you think the result would have been if they said I had won?”

The 2012 debacle was the first of three consecutive botched Iowa caucus nights. On Monday, the state’s Republican caucuses will once again be run by party volunteers at 1,657 caucus sites.

Local officials have repeatedly failed to meet the basic accounting standards Americans are accustomed to on election nights. And the kickoff contest for a 2024 election cycle that both major parties agree will decide the fate of American democracy is being hosted by a state with a history of fumbling the basic task of Democracy 101: accurately counting the votes.

Unlike primary and general elections operated on a regular basis by professionals, the Iowa way is to have regular people carry out the count. And it has not gone well.

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