The Iowa train wreck, with the Democratic presidential caucuses so disorganized that we still don’t know who won, surely must serve as the final nail in the coffin to end this quadrennial fiasco where the Hawkeye State sets the tone for the race to the White House.

The Democrats process went haywire due to a mobile app that didn’t work and a backup plan that was even worse, with some precinct captains put on hold for 90 minutes or more as they tried to call in their election results. A computer coding error was blamed for the cascade of mistakes as the secretive Iowa Democratic Party has still released only 62 percent of the results.

Nearly 24 hours after the process began, it should be noted that counting ballots in the Iowa caucuses isn’t exactly a daunting task. The average precinct experiences no more than 100 votes cast.

Preliminary information indicates that the turnout Tuesday night probably consisted of about 170,000 votes statewide. That is roughly the same amount as those who voted in Oakland County alone in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary in Michigan.

For two decades, the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses have faced staunch criticism, particularly from Democrats, who said that the state was too small, too white and too rural to serve as a bellwether state that carries the pulse of America.

‘This cooks Iowa’s goose’

No less than David Yepsen, who was the ultimate expert on the caucuses for decades while reporting for the Des Moines Register, essentially delivered the obituary for this odd process last night: “This fiasco means the end of the caucuses as a significant American political event. The rest of the country was already losing patience with Iowa anyway and this cooks Iowa’s goose. Frankly, it should.”

With conspiracy theories swirling about vote-rigging and some Republicans cackling over the Democrats’ screw-up, it appears that many are losing sight of the caucus’ history as a mess on both sides – among Democrats and Republicans. What we have is a complicated, quirky process overseen by amateurs in each precinct – many of them poorly trained elderly volunteers with nearly no knowledge of how to deal with a malfunctioning app – trying their best in an election that carries huge weight every four years.

Sen. Charles Grassley and fellow Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst stepped forward today pleading for their state to maintain it’s haughty perch in the presidential process. They rather ridiculously claimed that the incompetence shown in vote-counting is only a Democratic problem.

Perhaps they forgot about the debacle in the 1980 Iowa GOP caucus, a tight race between Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Some 165 mostly rural precincts favorable to Reagan were not included in the initial tally. It was later learned that 142 precincts never reported their results or didn’t hold caucuses.

That was one of several caucus quagmires where the votes, among either Republicans or Democrats, were announced as official results yet many days later it was learned that only 70 or 75 percent of the precinct results were reported.

In turn, Democrats who say Tuesday’s embarrassment was a one-off should be reminded that just four years ago, with a neck-and-neck caucus competition between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton – essentially a simple, two-person race – it took the Iowa Democratic Party until noon the next day to declare a winner.

Santorum was robbed in 2012

The most egregious disaster in recent years occurred in the Iowa Republican caucus of 2012, where Mitt Romney was wrongly declared the winner, robbing the eventual winner, Rick Santorum, of a big boost in momentum and fundraising gains. Sixteen days after caucuses were held, it was finally revealed by red-faced Republican officials that Santorum had won by 34 votes.

At the time, there were virtually no conspiracy theories about a Romney plot even though the right wing of the GOP (now the Trump diehards of 2020 who make wild claims on a daily basis) were anti-Romney then and almost universally despise the Utah senator eight years later. Times have changed in just eight years.

Consider the series of shameful errors that were eventually made public in that 2012 meltdown:

  • The vote totals from eight precincts disappeared and 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 totals for Santorum and Romney, announced at the end of a see-saw caucus night, were 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 Day total.
    • Despite the impression given on that Monday election night, all 99 counties didn’t turn in their documented results — Howard County was the last and arrived by fax Wednesday — 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 in each precinct two specific signatures of verification from election workers are required. Many forms had only one signature, or the wrong signature (for example, from a county GOP 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, state GOP Chairman Don Lucas said a supporter of a candidate – he wasn’t sure which — snatched 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 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 — (is) about as precise as choosing a class president.”

The much-belated truth about that election generated a bit of a furor, with some Republicans denouncing the caucus process. In the coming days, stories of cringeworthy Democratic foibles in 2020 will become public. So, we wait to see if the humiliation of this moment is enough to inspire Democrats to put their Iowa caucuses out of their misery – and if the Republicans will follow suit.