Iowa Democratic Party awards Buttigieg 14 delegates, Sanders 12 after caucus meltdown

close

Video

Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Iowa caucuses result, attacks from 2020 rivals, expectations for New Hampshire

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg joins Chris Wallace on 'Fox News Sunday.'

The Iowa Democratic Party announced Sunday that Pete Buttigieg has won 14 delegates and Bernie Sanders will be awarded 12, following the party's disastrous first-in-the-nation caucuses last week that have been plagued with apparent inaccuracies in crucial voting data.

Less than an hour after the results posted, the Sanders campaign announced that it would seek a partial recanvass of some precincts in which there were apparent irregularities, Fox News has confirmed. The Iowa Democratic Party has allowed campaigns to call for a recanvass until Monday at 1:00 p.m. ET.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., won eight delegates; Joe Biden six; and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., just one. Additionally, Iowa Democrats said they had reviewed voting data for 95 precincts and made corrections in 55 of them, accounting for three percent of the total 1,765 precincts in the state, after even more irregularities surfaced in recent days.

Sanders retained his significant lead in the popular vote in both rounds of caucusing. He fell behind in delegate count because some precincts are weighted differently by the Iowa Democrats, in a complex and little-understood -- and apparently poorly implemented -- formula.

As the meltdown continued to unfold Sunday, Jonah Hermann announced he would resign as Head of Media for the Iowa Democratic Party. He suggested that people should not question whether the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was again rigging the primary race against Sanders, as speculation would "feed[] into the narrative that will result in Trump's reelection."

But, it remained unclear whether the results would stand unmodified. DNC head Tom Perez last week said a recanvass, like the one being requested by the Sanders team, was needed to "assure public confidence."

"Enough is enough," Perez wrote on Twitter.

OH, NO! IOWA DEMS' GOOGLE DOCS SPREADSHEET SHOWS SLEW OF PRECINCT VOTING CORRECTIONS

A damning analysis by The New York Times last week found that the Iowa Democratic Party's figures were full of apparent errors, in which vote numbers from several precincts did not match totals provided by the party, and in which numerous precincts seemingly didn't follow caucus rules.

In one especially bizarre apparent mistake, the party reported that Deval Patrick had dominated in central Iowa, apparently because Sanders' votes had been incorrectly recorded as votes for Patrick.

Video

The Times reported that a "plausible explanation" for that mistake "is that an Iowa Democratic Party staff member accidentally copied the results of one column too far to the left in a spreadsheet for some precincts. ... Such errors inevitably occur in manual data entry, but the Iowa Democratic Party does not appear to have enough quality checks to assure that it reports accurate results."

The Associated Press announced last Thursday it was simply unable to declare a winner of the Democrats' Iowa caucuses.

BIDEN MOCKS BUTTIGIEG IN NEW DIGITAL VIDEO

"The Associated Press calls a race when there is a clear indication of a winner. Because of a tight margin between former Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Bernie Sanders and the irregularities in this year’s caucus process, it is not possible to determine a winner at this point," wrote Sally Buzbee, AP's senior vice president and executive editor.

Last week, both Buttigieg and Sanders declared victory in Iowa -- and appeared ready to move on.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

"We've got enough of Iowa," Sanders told a CNN town hall last week, suggesting he wouldn't bother with a recanvass even though the Iowa Democrats obviously had "screwed up" in a historic manner.

Fox News' Andrew Craft contributed to this report.