'People were breaking down crying': Iowa vote-counters tell of caucus debacle

Matthew Marroquin, a 20-year-old caucus captain for a satellite precinct in Buena Vista county in north-western Iowa, was eager to tell state party officials on Monday night that his candidate of choice, Bernie Sanders, had swept one of the county’s largest precincts.

Related: Iowa caucus chaos: Democrats plan to release results 'as soon as possible' – live coverage

That fitted a growing narrative of Sanders’ strength in the first-in-the nation caucuses. An average of a recent string of polls and results of a Des Moines Register/CNN Iowa poll that were pulled because of respondent concerns showed Sanders with a slight edge over Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, with Joe Biden fading off.

A rousing speech from Storm Lake city resident Linda Torres, a 24-year-old precinct captain, about how Sanders’ healthcare plan would have saved her father’s life helped seal the crowd’s preference for Sanders. Torres’ sister, Teresa, told the Guardian: “Bernie’s fighting for us for all the right reasons.”

The end count was 93-0 for Sanders. Twelve other people at the precinct, most of them supporting Buttigieg, decided they’d leave rather than throw their support behind the progressive firebrand.

Everything had been easy to run. Everything had worked.

Until Marroquin turned to the party-administered app to report his results at around 8.50pm.

That’s when events in at the precinct site – echoing similar scenes at hundreds of other caucus sites across the state – began to go very wrong. The app for transmitting results was not working in many places. A telephone hotline back-up system quickly became jammed. The TV cable news shows, eagerly awaiting results, rapidly turned to covering the ever-lengthening delay.

“The website wasn’t working, so we had to go to this hotline, where we had to wait, like, an hour to get anybody on the other line,” Marroquin said over the phone at about midnight on Tuesday morning. “And when we did, we got people on the other side who were breaking down crying. The whole thing took forever.”

Marroquin said he finally uploaded the results at around midnight.

Marroquin, Torres and the entirety of the local Sanders operation camped out until the wee hours of Tuesday morning in anticipation of the Democratic party releasing something. As of 10am local time, the state map was still blank, the party still maintaining results would be released at “some time” on Tuesday.

By then all the major candidates in Iowa had already given farewell speeches and moved on to the next state in the race: New Hampshire. But still no results had been released as officials scrambled to recount results verify them, as national and international headlines focused on the unfolding chaos.

A Guardian survey of caucus-goers and observers around Iowa showed experiences similar to that of Marroquin. Norbert Sarsfield, a Sanders precinct captain in Iowa City, said a mishandling of the first alignment delayed reporting in one of Iowa’s largest precincts; the reporting issue only compounded the issue, he said.

“Rage drinking,” he said of his experience at his Iowa City precinct.

The informal survey showed Sanders, Buttigieg and Warren making strong showings, and Amy Klobuchar was exceeding expectations. JD Scholten, a Sioux City Democrat running for Iowa’s fourth district, said results across western Iowa showed varied support for Klobuchar and Buttigieg. Sarsfield said Warren and Sanders led the way.

Still, without actual results, no one really knows.

The Iowa caucuses are never about the final delegate count; in total, its 41 delegates comprise around a single percentage point of the total delegate total. The caucuses are more of a stress test for the campaigns, explained Brad Best, a Buena Vista University political science professor and a longtime observer of the caucuses.

A win for Sanders or a better-than-expected turnout for Buttigieg or Warren could have spun new narratives of strength heading into the New Hampshire primaries and Super Tuesday. That’s why every four years Iowa is such a hard-fought battleground.

Related: Democrats head to New Hampshire with no frontrunner after Iowa catastrophe

That’s all for naught now.

Best said the caucuses and Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status are probably in jeopardy after Monday night’s fiasco.

“The Iowa caucuses generate narratives, both legitimate and not,” Best said in a recent interview. “The campaigns seize on them to demonstrate new strength heading into subsequent primaries, and the fact they can’t this time, is already posing headaches.”