Iowa Democratic party chair resigns after caucus chaos
The chair of the Iowa Democratic party, who oversaw a chaotic caucus last week that still has not yielded final results, resigned from his position on Wednesday.
Troy Price, who has been the head of the state’s Democratic party since 2017, apologized for what had happened on caucus night.
“As chair of this party, I am deeply sorry for what happened and bear the responsibility for any failures on behalf of the Iowa Democratic Party,” he said in a letter to the party’s state central committee. “It is time for the Iowa Democratic Party to begin looking forward, and my presence in my current role makes that more difficult.”
The caucus on 3 February was the first that Price oversaw. The effort was first derailed when a new app, which was supposed to collect results from more than 1,700 precincts, failed. Phone lines, which were set up as a failsafe, were backed up for hours, further delaying a tally. The party said that Trump followers who flooded the lines were partly to blame.
When the party eventually began reporting the results, they contained several mistakes, including reporting and mathematical errors.
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Days later, the party awarded Pete Buttigieg a narrow victory over Bernie Sanders. Even so, candidates have called for a recanvass of 143 precincts. The Associated Press has still not declared a winner.
Price’s resignation will take effect on Saturday, according to the letter. Prior to leading the state’s Democratic party, he worked on Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns in Iowa.
“Leadership requires tough decisions, and this is one of the toughest decisions,” he wrote. Price’s position came under question in the past week amid continued delays in reporting results.
The head of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, took some responsibility for the disorder in Iowa but also publicly criticized the state officials’ handling of the situation. In the coming year, Democrats should “have a further conversation about whether or not state parties should be running elections”, he said in an interview with CNN.
After the app used to report and count results in Iowa failed, the DNC abandoned plans to use a system made by the company that designed the Iowa app in the upcoming Nevada caucuses.
In a press conference, Price said the Iowa Democratic party “has begun a full, independent forensic review of the caucus: what went right, what went wrong, from start to finish”.
