The Republican Party of Iowa plans to report Iowa caucus results in real time on caucus night Monday as volunteers submit vote tallies from 1,657 precincts across the state, and candidates for the GOP presidential nomination hope to gain momentum from the results of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation nominating contest.
RPI Chair Jeff Kaufmann said at a fundraiser this week that the party has done more than 200 trainings, raised the necessary funds, and is “approaching 10,000 volunteers” to make the caucuses happen.
“So we’re very, very confident that we have done everything humanly possible to make sure that this caucus comes off without a hitch,” he said.
There have been problems in the recent past with getting timely, accurate Iowa caucus results.
In 2012, the RPI declared Mitt Romney the winner, even though Rick Santorum had actually won.
This year, RPI officials said the party will not declare a winner on caucus night. They plan to simply make the results, considered unofficial on caucus night, available to the public. Media organizations could use that information to project a winner.
In 2020, the Iowa Democratic Party’s results reporting system failed in many ways, and nobody knew who won for several days.
At the Republican caucuses, caucusgoers will write or select their preferred presidential candidate on a piece of paper and hand it in.
Kaufmann said what follows is “the most transparent process” in the country.
“The votes are counted in front of the room,” he said. “Then the votes are recorded in front of the room. And each candidate can have a representative watching them counted and reported in front of the room.”
Kaufmann said precinct chairs will also report their results to state party headquarters in front of the room.
To handle that, the RPI hired Red Oak Strategic to develop a cloud-based web reporting system. Chief Revenue Officer Patrick Stewart told reporters recently that party volunteers have received training on how to set up their accounts, log into the vote collection app, and report results through the app.
When the results arrive at party headquarters, officials will check them against historical data to ensure the votes are in line with typical numbers at each precinct. When a precinct’s results are approved, they are supposed to show up on the Iowa GOP’s website.
Stewart said officials have been working to ensure the system is secure and can withstand the high traffic expected on caucus night.
“We built it to, and above, industry standards for event-based websites,” he said. “With that being said, we have fail-overs in place, should there be any sort of outages, natural disasters, data center failures. Essentially, what I’m trying to say is, short of a complete worldwide collapse of the internet, we should not have a problem with the data feed.”
Stewart said if there is a problem, the RPI will send out results in a news release.
He said results reported through the app are considered unofficial.
Official vote tallies are recorded on a paper form by each precinct chair. The RPI collects those forms after the caucuses, and the official results come from the paper forms.
“As far as voter integrity goes, this is the model what we are doing here in Iowa,” Kaufmann said. “And that is by the party. That is not a state-run model."
The caucuses are Monday, January 15th at 7 p.m. Find more information here about how to participate in the Republican and Democratic caucuses.
