I keep reading this bit that Mitt Romney was initially incorrectly reported as the winner of the GOP caucus in 2012, but I can't seem to find much in the way of details why that happened, e.g. in WaPo:
In 2012, it was the Republican caucus that was a mess. Back then, Mitt Romney was named the winner of the caucuses by eight votes — a narrow victory, yes, but still a victory for the favorite to be the Republican nominee.
Romney went on to win the New Hampshire primary comfortably, apparently winning the often-elusive double in the first two contests — he would have been the first Republican to ever win both Iowa and New Hampshire — and setting him on course to face incumbent President Barack Obama.
Except eight days after that New Hampshire win, we found Romney actually finished second in Iowa. The Iowa GOP announced, 16 days after the caucuses, that Rick Santorum had actually finished first — by 34 votes. But even that result was tinged by uncertainty:
Santorum’s strange, belated victory also served to embarrass the Iowa GOP — which had to admit that it had misallocated some votes, and simply lost some others, in a razor’s-edge election where every vote mattered.
It also cast an unflattering light on the old-fashioned and convoluted system that the party uses to collect and count caucus votes.
What exactly were the reasons for this failure in 2012? There was no app then...