Let’s hope we don’t see a vote-counting debacle in Iowa like in 2012

The tsunami of Iowa caucus coverage in the media over the past few days has avoided one key aspect of the first-in-the-nation nominating process: Can party officials in the Hawkeye State actually count the ballots in a fair, objective manner?

What has become a footnote in history is that the all-important Iowa caucus results in 2012 were reported in such a haphazard manner that the process undoubtedly gave Mitt Romney an undeserved advantage in his road to the Republican presidential nomination.

Four years ago, red-faced Iowa Republican Party officials announced two weeks after the caucuses that Mitt Romney’s eight-vote winning margin was, upon further review, a 34-vote win for Rick Santorum. That post-New Hampshire admission robbed Santorum of a dramatic momentum swing in his favor.

On the Democratic side, the caucus process is also suspect. With votes in precincts counted by a paper ballot or a show of hands, the Iowa process, which has an outsized impact on who occupies the most important office in the world, is handled in a manner that is just one step above a student council election.

To put this into perspective…. Vox--- It should be noted at this point that counting ballots in the Iowa caucuses isn't exactly a daunting task. The average precinct experiences about 70 votes cast.

The details that emerged after the specious Dewey-defeats-Truman reported outcome in the 2012 GOP caucus is downright scary. Especially with close outcomes predicted tonight on both sides – between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz for the Republicans, and potentially dividing Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders by the narrowest of margins in the Democratic contest.

The Iowa caucuses have no provisions for a recount, and the basic post-vote certification process revealed in 2012 a series of shameful errors for the GOP election that belie the basics of a professional vote counting system:

• The vote totals from eight precincts disappeared and, weeks later, no one knew where they were. On Election Night, many numbers from across the state were simply relayed by phone to an undisclosed GOP location established to ward against computer hackers and protesters.

• Not only did the winning tally change by 42 votes, the so-called final result showed that the previous total number of votes cast for Santorum and Romney, announced at the end of a see-saw caucus night, was off by 378 votes.
• The certification process exposed inaccuracies in 131 precincts. Changes in one precinct alone shifted the vote by 50 — a margin greater than the Election Night total.
• Despite the impression given on Election Night by the media, the 99 counties didn’t collectively turn in their documented results (Howard County was the last, arriving by FAX two days later) until party officials had to hunt down dozens of missing precincts.
• Results for some precincts came in on pieces of paper other than the official forms. According to the Des Moines Register, many violated a rule that two specific signatures of verification for party officials are required. Many forms had only one signature, or the wrong signature (for example, from a county chair). Another 18 documents had no signatures at all.
• Many mistakes were blamed on typos but, in the sparsely populated rural areas of Iowa, a small typo can mean a big difference, especially in an election this close. For example, a reported 54 votes in Illyria Township should have been 5, and 54 votes in Oelwein’s third precinct should have been 4.
• In Lee County, then-GOP Chairman Don Lucas said he believed a supporter of a candidate — he’s not sure which — took the certification document to report to the candidate how he or she did and never brought it back.
• Feebly attempting to explain their mistakes, precinct captains later claimed their results were lost in the mail, lost in the paper shuffle, or possibly misfiled, according to the Register. Cerro Gordo County GOP Chairman John Rowe said at the time that he sent an 18-inch-thick stack of documents by snail-mail to state Republican offices the day after the caucuses. He has no idea how one precinct turned up missing. In another county where a precinct’s documents disappeared, a party official said he would have made copies before sending them off but his copy machine broke.
• The botched election prompted the Register to admit that the caucuses rely upon “a loose process in which colored slips of paper are gathered in cardboard boxes and plastic buckets and counted by hand as witnesses gather around — about as precise as choosing a class president.”

In the aftermath, befuddled party officials in the small, rural state of Iowa deemed the tainted outcome between Santorum and Romney a “split decision.” Iowa state GOP chairman Matt Strawn resigned in disgrace.

This time around, the Republican National Committee has ended Iowa’s heavily criticized, multi-tiered process of choosing national convention delegates. But it’s unclear if the basic Election Night vote-counting process has improved.

For decades, among both Republicans and Democrats, the Iowa outcome was reported as official results. These were game-changing events within the nominating process. Yet, in some cases, many days later, it was learned that only 70 or 75 percent of the precinct results were reported.

In a tight 1980 GOP race between Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in Iowa, 165 mostly rural precincts favorable to Reagan were not included in the initial tally. Bush won the caucus vote but it was later discovered that 142 precincts never reported their results or didn’t hold caucuses.

To put things into perspective, the difference between a first- and third-place finish in the low-turnout Iowa caucuses can be as little as 4,000 votes. In many elections in small U.S. cities, the margins are similar.

That’s why proper vote-counting in all of the state’s 1,700 precincts is essential.   

In 2000, the infamous, ill-conceived Butterfly Ballot in Palm Beach County, Fla. – a tiny slice of America – probably determined the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.

Nearly two decades later, why are we still relying upon archaic election procedures that can determine who will occupy the White House?