Iowa Republican caucus results will be posted in real time on caucus night

DES MOINES — Get ready to click that “refresh” button: The results of the first-in-the-nation Iowa Republican presidential caucus will be reported in real time on a public website, the state party said Thursday.

Scheduled for Jan. 15 at 7 p.m., the Iowa Republican caucuses will kick off the nation’s quadrennial process of electing the next U.S. president.

The Iowa Republican caucus results will be displayed online and constantly updated through the evening as they are reported to and confirmed by the state party, Republican Party of Iowa consultant Patrick Stewart told reporters Thursday.

Stewart said the results will be processed in three stages: vote collection at the 1,657 precincts across the state, verification at state party headquarters, and the public reporting to the website.

Stewart said the system is cloud-based and was built by an unspecified “leading” cloud provider to manage the volume of traffic it will receive on caucus night, while also being secure.

“We have worked to build (the caucus results reporting system) with well-architected principles, basically a framework to make sure that this is performance secure (and) scalable so that we can handle the traffic that we expect on caucus night,” Stewart told reporters during a virtual conference call.

“And we’re also secure from any sort of outside aggressors, be it a dedicated denial-of-service attack or someone trying to hack the system and alter votes,” he said.

Former President Donald Trump is widely expected to win the 2024 Iowa Republican caucuses. He has held a commanding and consistent lead over the rest of the Republican presidential primary field in polling both nationally, and in Iowa.

In Real Clear Politics’ latest rolling averages of polling in Iowa, Trump is at 51 percent while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is at 18.6 percent and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley is at 16.1 percent. In similar polling averages at fivethirtyeight.com, Trump is at 50 percent, DeSantis at 18.4 and Haley at 15.7.

Caucus night

According to Stewart, state party volunteers at each precinct will tabulate and report that precinct’s caucus results to the state party through the web-based reporting system, which was built specifically for the 2024 Iowa Republican caucuses.

Safeguards will be in place to ensure the results are reported accurately. For example, each precinct’s results must be entered twice, and if there are any inconsistencies, the system will reject those results and the precinct volunteer will have to start over.

Once a precinct’s results are submitted to the state party, the system will close that precinct so its results cannot be changed, Stewart said.

The system also tracks what time the results are submitted and by whom, he said.

Once the results are submitted, they will be verified by state party workers, who will look for results that look erroneous or stand out compared to historical caucus results and voter registration data.

“We’re not changing votes; we’re not entering votes here. We are simply verifying that the results that we receive match what we would expect from the precincts across the state … to make sure that we don’t see anything … out of the norm,” Stewart said. “This is just our layer of quality control to ensure nothing gets reported that is incorrect.”

Going live

The caucus results reporting website will go live on the day of the caucuses, Stewart said.

Stewart said the state party, over the past few months, has been training the thousands of volunteers who will be responsible for reporting results to the state party on caucus night.

“We have done multiple test runs with them, as well as had trainings involved with them to show them not only logging in, setting up their accounts, but also using the system across the caucus night,” he said.

A reporting system built by a contractor to help Iowa Democrats report the results of their 2020 presidential caucuses failed on caucus night, leaving the party without complete results for three days. Final results, following a recount, were released more than three weeks after the caucuses, one of the factors that persuaded the national Democratic Party to boot Iowa Democrats from their leadoff spot in the presidential nomination process this year.

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