‘Majority’ of Iowa results expected at 5 pm EST

The chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) told the presidential campaigns on Tuesday to expect that a “majority” of the caucus results will be released at 5 p.m. EST, according to a source on the call.

IDP communications director Mandy McClure followed up with a statement, saying that the rest of the results will be released “as we are able to.”

“Today we informed campaigns that we will be releasing the majority of caucus results at 4p.m. CST,” McClure said. “Moving forward — just like we would have on caucus night — we will continue to release results as we are able to. We are also executing our plans and procedures to gather the paper documents and chasing any additional precincts to report results as we normally would on caucus night.”

The Iowa Democratic Party is under intense pressure to produce the results of Monday’s caucuses, which have been delayed due to reporting issues and a problem with a phone app that was meant to transmit the final tallies.

The caucuses got underway at 8 p.m. EST on Monday. The campaigns, volunteers, voters and the news media have been furious at the delay and at the lack of transparency into what went wrong.

Most of the presidential candidates hit the road last night or early this morning for New Hampshire, which will hold its primary on Feb. 11.

The state party’s bungling of the results has raised questions about Iowa’s status as the first state to vote and about the viability of caucuses, which are inherently more chaotic and complicated than primary elections.

The Iowa Democratic Party blamed the reporting issues on a new app the precincts were relying on to transmit results did not function properly.

The process was also complicated by a new effort to report raw vote totals along with the delegate totals, which will determine who wins the nomination.