WASHINGTON • The stunning admission by the Iowa Republican Party that Rick Santorum -- not Mitt Romney -- may have won the Iowa precinct caucuses gives would-be reformers new ammunition to challenge America's curious process of electing a president.
After all, the story after the Iowa vote on Jan. 3 would have been Santorum upsetting Romney, and in the unpredictable flow of momentum politics it might be Santorum, not Newt Gingrich, positioned as the main challenger to Romney on the eve of the conservative-dominated South Carolina primary tomorrow.
The turnabout also harks back to the 1988 Democratic vote in Iowa, where former St. Louis Rep. Dick Gephardt scored a narrow victory over Paul Simon, a victory questioned over the years by allies of the late senator from southern Illinois. Gephardt and Simon eventually lost out to then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who was defeated by George H.W. Bush in the general election.
On the night of Feb. 8, 1988, Gephardt was reported to be the winner in Iowa, leading Simon 27-24 percent with 70 percent of the votes counted. Dukakis was third with 21 percent. That tally was based on results from the state Democratic Party obtained by News Election Service, a consortium of television networks and the Associated Press.
But that count, essentially a straw poll, excluded 750 precincts, Dennis Goldford, a Drake University political science professor and co-author of "The Iowa Precinct Caucuses: The Making of a Media Event," recalled today.
Later, the state party reported that Gephardt had defeated Simon by 4.5 percent not in the straw poll but in what was termed state delegate equivalents.
Brian Lunde, Simon's campaign manager then, observed this week that Simon ultimately ended up with more delegates than Gephardt during Iowa's selection process -- delegates that he later released. Yet Gephardt received the "bump" from Iowa heading into the New Hampshire primary. Lunde lays part of the blame with the news media's haste to report results of caucuses like they're primaries.
Regarding the missing precincts, he said: "Nobody's ever going to know because the process stops."
Goldford said,"The fact that we don't know if there was a problem or not is, in and of itself, an indictment of the amateurishness of the process."
The amateur nature of the Iowa caucuses was on vivid display this year in the reversal that led to Santorum's 34-vote lead. Besides acknowledging eight missing precincts, Iowa GOP officials said Thursday they discovered double-digit errors in 51 certified precincts when the votes were compared to the tallies on election night.
"It's certainly an embarrassment," Goldford said. "On the other hand, this error doesn't have a large impact...Santorum got his bump."
A larger question that will be debated later is whether Americans should be satisfied opening the presidential election process with a smaller state and its amateur ways, a state not representative of the nation. Over the years, many changes have been proposed, among them regional primaries voting monthly beginning in March.
David Yepsen is director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University and, before that, covered many Iowa caucuses as chief political reporter for the Des Moines Register. He observed that caucus counts have been suspect from their beginning: In 1976, Democrats apparently inflated the victory margin of Jimmy Carter, who went on to become president, and in 1980 Ronald Reagan, and not Bush, as reported by Republicans, might actually have won.
"If Iowa wants to do this, then Iowa has to get it right. These are stupid errors," Yepsen said.
He has suggested putting county auditors in charge of tallies. "You have Ma Jones down the street checking people in, and Ma Jones counting the votes...Candidates are going to say, 'wait a minute, I'm supposed to spend six months of my life and $10 million with no guarantee I'll get an accurate count?' The media is not going to stand for it either."
