Iowa Republican Party chairman Matt Strawn has backed away slightly from the state party’s earlier hedging on whether Rick Santorum won the state caucuses over national frontrunner Mitt Romney. But Strawn is still limiting his analysis to declaring Santorum the winner of the precincts with all official certification.
“One thing that is irrefutable is that is that in these 1,776 certified precincts, the Republican party was able to certify and report Rick Santorum was the winner of the certified precinct vote total by 34 votes,” Strawn told a press conference, the Des Moines Register reports.
“The one thing that we can’t say is, we can’t certify every precinct in the state. And I just want to make that distinction,” Strawn also added, and citing the missing official forms from eight additional precincts. “Any time you have a vote margin that’s within a hundredth of a percentage point there’s always the possibility that human error comes into play.”
It should be noted that including hte caucus-night totals from those eight precincts, Santorum’s lead expands to 69 votes. While it cannot be disproven that his 35-vote margin across those precincts might contain an error, it is also highly unlikely that such an error would have occurred to reverse Santorum’s victory.
