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'A mess:' Iowa caucus delays blamed on app problem

It has led to caucus sites having to call their results in, with many having to wait on hold for long periods.

Problems with a mobile app appear to have forced a major delay in reporting the results of the Iowa caucuses, as the campaigns, voters and the media are pressing party officials for an explanation.

The Iowa Democratic Party says it expects to release data from the Iowa caucuses later Tuesday.

Organizers said they were not able to test the app until hours before voting began Monday. Iowa party officials said it delayed the rollout to narrow the window for any interference.

An Iowa Democratic party official points to “quality control” as the source of the delays — but notes that about a quarter of the state's nearly 1,700 precincts have reported their data already. She said the delay was not due to a "hack or an intrusion."

Even if it was not a hack, some officials were pointing to the technology as the problem.

Des Moines County Democratic Chair Tom Courtney says he heard that a mobile app created for caucus organizers to report results to the party was “a mess.”

Bill Brauch, a chair at one caucus location, said he had no problems with the app when he tested, but it was a different story when an update came in over the weekend.

"And then today when I tried to log in on my iPad, a keyboard popped up on the screen, but it was only half of a keyboard, so I only had half of the digits and half of the letters to use and that meant I could not type in my PIN to access the app. So it was one of those situations where we had a backup telephone number and we had to use it," Brauch said.

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Brauch said some precincts were stuck on hold for awhile.

In a bizarre moment on live TV, an Iowa precinct secretary who had been on hold waiting to report results with the state Democratic Party was also on the phone live with CNN. When the person on the other end finally answered, they hung up on the secretary.

A precinct chairwoman says she did not use the new app because organizers had problems trying to download and test it.

"We came to a consensus not to use it," said Ruth Thompson, who chaired a precinct at Lincoln High School in Des Moines.

Lawrence Norden, elections expert with The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, said waiting to the last minute to send out the app was akin to a major retailer using new cash registers for the first time on Black Friday.

“To roll out a new technology without really testing it and making it available as early as possible and giving folks the opportunity to challenge it and work out all the bugs is a high-stakes decision which I think is proving to be problematic today,” Norden said.

Norden said party officials were wise to slow down the reporting to ensure accurate results, given concerns of another round of election interference by Russia or other hostile governments seeking to undermine U.S. democracy.

Sources told NBC News that the state party hosted a conference call with the campaigns after 11 p.m. ET and it became very heated. NBC News reported party leaders wound up hanging up on campaign officials who were pressing for more information on the reporting issues.

President Donald Trump's campaign was quick to jump on the reports, implying, without any evidence, that the election was being rigged.

“Quality control = rigged?” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted.

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