Democrat nominees Senator Sanders and Mayor Buttigieg in virtual tie in Iowa

As the US presidential race heats up, two of the democratic nominees, Senator Bernie Sanders and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg ended up in a virtual tie in Iowa caucuses. However, both candidates declared themselves the winner of Iowa caucuses.

Washington: Two of the leading Democratic contenders for the 2020 presidential nomination, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, were in a virtual tie in the Iowa caucuses with 97 per cent of the precincts reported.

As of Thursday, the moderate Buttigieg was projected to garner 550 so-called state delegate equivalents (SDEs), or 26.2 per cent of the total.

Sanders, who represents the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, was very close behind with a projected 547 SDEs, or 26.1 per cent of the total.

Both candidates declared themselves the winner of Monday night's Iowa caucuses, the initial contest in a race that will determine who faces President Donald Trump in the November 3 election.

"What I want to do today, three days late, is I want to thank the people of Iowa for the very strong victory they gave us at the Iowa caucuses on Monday night," the 78-year-old Sanders said on Thursday, referring to his narrow lead over Buttigieg - of 26.53 per cent to 25.04 per cent - in the popular vote.

Party officials in that midwestern state have said that the winner should be deemed to be the candidate who accrues the biggest share of the SDEs, which later translate into pledged delegates who will attend the July 13-16 Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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Iowa awards just 41 pledged delegates (allocated proportionately) to the convention in 2020, a small fraction of the 1,990 delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination.

The 38-year-old Buttigieg, for his part, started declaring himself the winner even before any results had been released following the election, which has been plagued by a software glitch that Iowa Democratic Party officials said on Monday had triggered "inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results".

Amid the technical problems and the delays in announcing the winner, Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez on Thursday called for a re-canvass of the Iowa caucuses results.

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"Enough is enough," President tweeted, adding that "a re-canvass is a review of the worksheets from each caucus site to ensure accuracy". He said, however, that Iowa Democratic Party officials will continue to report results.

The Iowa caucuses employ a unique voting process in which people - instead of casting a secret ballot and going home, as they will in the first primary in New Hampshire next week and most other states - gather at school gymnasiums, public libraries and other sites and have the chance to interact with other voters and persuade them to back their favoured candidate.

At the hundreds of caucus sites, people "vote with their feet" by standing in a section of the room set aside for their candidate. But if their first choice has very little support, they may be persuaded to back someone else in a second, or final, alignment.

Traditionally, the candidate with the most SDEs has been considered the winner of that state, but in a change this year Iowa also is reporting the results of the two alignment processes.

The idea was to enhance transparency by showing who fared best in the popular vote, but in this case it has led to competing claims of victory.

Despite trailing in the popular vote, Buttigieg has a slim 0.1 per cent lead in SDEs because he fared better than Sanders in the final alignment at the majority of caucus sites.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who has been leading his Democratic rivals in most national polls, stands in a distant fourth in Iowa with 15.8 per cent of SDEs, behind Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren (18.2 per cent).

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Trump on Tuesday seized on the technical problems in the Iowa election to take a jab at his political rivals.

The Democratic caucuses on Monday night were "an unmitigated disaster", said the President, who also referred to his predictable landslide victory in the Republican caucuses in Iowa that same evening.

(With inputs from IANS)