Concerns about voter fraud have erupted in the too-close-to-call Iowa race between Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, reports say.
The Burlington Free Press reports Tuesday the issue first arose when C-Span reported a caucus chairperson and Clinton precinct captain in Polk County — the state's most populous — didn't do a count of the delegates.
Results were also slow to come in from the county, which is home to the state capital of Des Moines and will award the largest number of delegates, the newspaper reports.
About 5 percent in the county, or some 90 precincts, were still unreported at the time Clinton and Sanders addressed their supporters late Monday night, the newspaper reports.
"You're guess is as good as mine as to what happened," Sanders said on a charter flight to New Hampshire, the Free Press reports. "I can only hope and expect the count will be honest."
Campaign spokesman Symone Sanders said the delayed results were due to the Iowa Democratic Party's failure to staff the precincts in question.
"They are asking the campaigns to sort it out," she said, prompting one reporter aboard the plane to blurt out: "Iowa just became Florida."
"You said it, I did not," Symone Sanders replied.
The self-reporting of the totals could lead to fractious arguments in a swath of precincts that could more than make up the margin between the two candidates,
The Hill notes.
And the push-back from Iowa's Democratic Party was swift, The Hill reports; the state party is denying it didn't staff the caucus sites in question.
"The reports of precincts without chairs are inaccurate," one unnamed official tells both The Hill and
Roll Call.
"We have reached out to the campaigns for help in contacting the chairs for our outstanding precincts, the official tells the sites in a statement. "We are not taking results from the campaigns. We are taking them from the chairs who are in these precincts."
Rania Batrice, a spokeswoman for the Sanders campaign based in Iowa, however, tells
The New York Times the confusion over the tally is "just offensive that they dropped the ball like this. It's ridiculous."
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