Former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg “questioned his third place finish” in the Nevada caucuses, Monday, suggesting that the official results, which put Buttigieg in third behind Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former Vice President Joe Biden, were riddled with “irregularities” and, in some cases, incomplete.
Fox News reports that Buttigieg’s campaign sent a letter to the Nevada Democratic Party Sunday night, claiming that “the process of integrating four days of early voting into in-person caucuses held Saturday was ‘plagued with errors and inconsistencies,'” and suggesting that Buttigieg is owed more votes and, by extension, more delegates.
Media covering the Nevada caucuses did report that some caucus locations were shortstaffed (and some not staffed at all), and campaign officials reportedly admit that “they received reports that volunteers running caucuses did not appear to follow rules that could have allowed candidates to pick up more support on second rounds of voting.”
Unlike Iowa, Nevadans can, in some cases, vote in the caucuses beginning on the Sunday before the actual event, leaving it difficult for precinct captains and volunteers without a clear understanding of the process unable to fairly tabulate results. Caucuses, because they occur only once every few years, are often difficult to manage and can prove unwieldy, compared to the more streamlined, balloted primary.
Buttigieg’s primary complaint, though, is that the Nevada Democratic Party is not being transparent about vote totals. The campaign questioned, also, how Nevada could certify “official” results with just around 60% of the precincts reporting in.
“First, release early vote and in-person vote totals by precinct,” the Buttigieg campaign’s letter read. “Second, correct any outstanding second alignment errors identified by presidential campaigns, including ours…Third, explain anomalies in the data.”
According to the Buttigieg campaign, their internal calculations have the former South Bend mayor in second, not third, and entitled to the nine delegates awared to Biden instead of the three they received.
“Currently our data shows that this is a razor-thin margin for second place in Nevada, and due to irregularities and a number of unresolved questions we have raised with the Nevada Democratic Party, it’s unclear what the final results will be,” Buttigieg’s campaign manager told media Sunday, adding that they received “more than 200 reports” of caucus errors from Buttigieg supporters.
By Monday, though, that “razor thin” margin seemed to have widened. With 96% of the precincts now reporting in, the New York Times has Biden comfortably ahead of Buttigieg, 20% to 13%, and narrowing in on Sanders — though, in this case, that means losing 46% to 20% instead 46% to 15%.
Nevada Democrats, though, insist that they are not about to replay the Iowa chaos.
“We laid out our early vote and Caucus Day processes step by step and we communicated these processes to all campaigns,” they told Fox News and other media outlets Monday. “We are continuing to verify and to report results. We never indicated we would release a separate breakdown of early vote and in-person attendees by precinct and will not change our reporting process now. As laid out in our recount guidance, there is a formal method for requesting a challenge of results.”
Buttigieg also challenged the vote totals in Iowa, for the record; the campaign still claims that it won both the popular vote and the delegate count there, despite being awarded the most delegates and narrowly losing the popular vote to Sanders.