- Trump supporters inundated a hotline used by Iowa Caucus precinct leaders to report their results Monday night, contributing to a delay in of the final tally.
- The party's hotline number was repeatedly posted to the right-wing 4chan online message board where users, who are anonymous, urged each other to call in, according to NBC News.
- "Uh oh how unfortunate it would be for a bunch of mischief makers to start clogging the lines," one user wrote Monday night.
- State party officials haven't said how many prank calls came in and how much it exacerbated the vote count delay, which has stretched into Thursday.
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Trump supporters inundated a hotline used by Iowa Caucus precinct leaders to report their tallies, contributing to significant delays in the final tally, Iowa Democratic party officials said.
NBC News reports that the party's hotline number was repeatedly posted to the 4chan online message board as voting took place on Monday night. 4chan users, who are anonymous and known for trolling and harassing the president's political opponents, urged each other to call in.
"Uh oh how unfortunate it would be for a bunch of mischief makers to start clogging the lines," one user wrote Monday night, according to NBC News.
Ken Sagar, a state Democratic central committee member, told reporters on a Wednesday night conference call that he fielded calls from people who dialed in to express their support for the president, Bloomberg News reported.
State party officials told reporters that they identified and blocked repeat prank callers. Officials didn't say how many intentionally disruptive calls came in and how much they exacerbated the vote count delay.
"The unexplained, and at times hostile, calls contributed to the delay in the Iowa Democratic Party's collection of results, but in no way affected the integrity of information gathered or the accuracy of data sets reported," the Iowa state Democratic Party said in a Thursday statement.
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh told NBC that the campaign didn't have anything to do with the disruptions and said it was "laughable that [Democrats] would try to blame Trump for their own incompetence."
The Iowa caucus results were delayed by days due to a malfunctioning mobile app that recorded incorrect results to the Iowa Democratic Party. The caucus took place on Monday, and 97% of the vote was reported by Wednesday evening, showing former Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the lead with just 0.1% more votes than Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The New York Times released a report Thursday morning detailing inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the vote tallies reported by the state party even after the party conducted "quality control checks." The review found that data reported by over 100 of Iowa's 1,765 precincts either weren't possible under the caucus rules or didn't match the data reported by the state party.
But The Times didn't find any evidence that the inconsistencies were intentional.
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