Will a skeptical GOP electorate trust the Iowa results?

Monday’s Iowa caucuses will be the Republicans’ first election of the 2024 presidential primary contest. It will also be former President Donald Trump’s first appearance on a ballot since he lost the White House to Joe Biden in 2020 and inflamed many of his supporters with unfounded claims of widespread election fraud. 

And caucuses – a longtime tradition in Iowa as well as a handful of other states – could present a challenge for an already-skeptical electorate and a front-runner with a history of crying foul if he doesn’t win. 

The arcane process, which emphasizes grassroots politicking, has launched numerous underdog campaigns in the Hawkeye State. But it also has a well-documented history of delays and inaccuracies.

“Should Trump lose, or should he do much worse than anticipated, then I think the complexity of the [caucus] rules will give rise to ammunition to complain,” says Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.

Caucuses are run by parties, not government officials. In 2020, Iowa Democrats bungled their caucuses so badly – with vote count discrepancies and a multiday delay in tallying results – that this year the Democratic National Committee bumped Iowa out of its kickoff spot in the primary schedule. Republicans, too, have had caucus mishaps: In 2012, the Iowa GOP declared that Mitt Romney had won by just eight votes – only to announce two weeks later that Rick Santorum was actually the winner. 

State officials insist nothing like that will happen this year.

“We’re very, very confident that we’ve done everything humanly possible to make sure that this caucus comes off without a hitch,” Jeff Kaufmann, chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, told a roomful of Republican legislators in Des Moines earlier this week.

Still, any kind of delay or miscalculation could further erode trust. Even without any irregularities, an upset on Monday would almost certainly strike Trump supporters as suspicious, given that polls here have shown the former president holding a commanding lead for months. In 2016, after he lost in Iowa to Ted Cruz, Mr. Trump claimed the Texas senator only beat him because he “stole it.” 

The biggest criticism of caucuses in general – among both Republicans and Democrats – is that the format limits participation. Unlike in a typical primary, when voters can show up anytime, cast their ballot, and leave, caucus participants must arrive at a specific time and often stay for hours. 

This means they typically attract only the party’s most dedicated voters. That’s particularly true in Iowa, whose caucuses take place in the middle of winter on a weeknight. In 2016, only about 30% of the state’s registered Republicans participated. And this year’s election is forecast to be the coldest caucuses on record, potentially below zero degrees, which is raising concerns about turnout.

At his rally in Clinton last weekend, Mr. Trump speculated that the extreme temperatures would benefit his campaign.

“I hear the weather’s going to be very cold,” he told a packed gymnasium of supporters. “Why is that good? Because the other side won’t have a vote. They don’t have any enthusiasm.”

The Republican caucuses here don’t involve the complicated in-person shuffling between candidates’ designated room corners as did the Democratic caucuses notoriously. But the process is still different from a typical primary election. 

Voters must arrive at one of the state’s roughly 700 caucus sites – in schools, libraries, fire stations, or occasionally living rooms – by 7 p.m. Local party officials or volunteers check people in using registration lists provided by the secretary of state, and after voters show a valid ID, they are given a paper ballot.

“It’s a 2-by-4 little sheet of paper,” says Gloria Mazza, chair of the Polk County GOP. “Don’t lose it, because you don’t get another.”  

One person speaks for three minutes on behalf of each candidate (this year, the Trump campaign has organized a slate of “caucus captains” with custom hats to give these speeches).

Ballots are then filled out and “picked up in a basket like in a church offering dish,” says Ms. Mazza, who manages the caucuses in the state’s most populous county. Each campaign is allowed one observer as local organizers stack and count the ballots before announcing their precinct’s winner and uploading the results to an online database. 

“We count our votes in the same room where the votes are cast. We report the votes in the same room where the votes are cast. A representative can observe the counting. Everything we report has a paper trail,” Mr. Kaufmann tells the Monitor. “You will not find a more open and transparent process in the United States.”

In some ways, the more intimate aspect of the caucus process could potentially prove helpful in combating worries about election fraud, says MIT’s Professor Stewart.

“Republican election skeptics, they’re going to go into somebody’s living room or they’re going to go into a church basement, and they’re going to see the precinct chair of the Republican Party, who’s a neighbor, another Republican who lives down the street from them, running the meeting. That might reassure them that things will be fair,” he says.

But that same Republican from “down the street” also may not have much experience – and could have a harder time controlling the crowd if things were to go sideways.

“Even if they’ve run these caucuses before,” notes Professor Stewart, “they haven’t run them since the 2020 election.”