Buttigieg campaign alleges "irregularities" in Nevada results
Pete Buttigieg's campaign has sent a letter to the Nevada state Democratic party alleging that there were "irregularities" in results from Saturday's caucuses. While Sanders has won the caucus, the breakdown of how Nevada will allocate its 36 delegates has not yet been announced.
Buttigieg's campaign asked in the letter for the state party to release raw early vote and in-person totals by precinct. The campaign also alleged that there were second alignment errors, and called on the party to explain anomalies in the data.
"Given how close the race is between second and third place, we ask that you take these steps before releasing any final data," Buttigieg's campaign wrote.
In response, the Nevada Democratic Party communications director Molly Forgey said the party had "laid out our early vote and Caucus Day processes step-by-step" and had let all the campaigns know.
"We are continuing to verify and to report results," Forgey said. "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."
Nevada's caucus was just three weeks after Iowa, where there was chaos in reporting the results. Earlier this week, Buttigieg and Sanders both requested the state party conduct a recount of specific precinct caucuses, according to the Iowa Democratic Party. This came after Buttigieg and Sanders earlier this month asked the Iowa Democratic Party to conduct a recanvass of limited precincts. The recanvass resulted in no change in national delegates awarded to the two candidates, but did lead to a slight change in state delegate equivalents.
According to the Iowa Democratic Party, a recount is a "hand count and audit of Presidential Preference Cards to ensure that caucus votes were tallied and reported correctly in the caucus worksheets and reporting forms."
Alex Tin, Nikole Killion, Caroline Linton and Melissa Quinn contributed to this report.