Embattled Iowa GOP chairman Matt Strawn will step down at the end of next week, he said this morning, citing competing priorities in his personal, business and political life.Strawn has come under heavy fire recently from presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s backers who think he deliberately refused to acknowledge Santorum’s victory in the caucuses. He said in a letter to Iowa Republicans this morning that Friday, Feb. 10 will be his final day.

“The party is strong and has the resources in place for victory in November,” Strawn wrote. “Now is the time to transition to new leadership.”

GOP party rules say that any vacancy in the chairman job is to be filled by the co-chairman – and in this case, that’s Bill Schickel, a well-liked former state lawmaker and former party secretary from Mason City. The next meeting of the GOP central committee, the party’s board of directors, is Feb. 11.

After revitalizing a party that was beleaguered and in debt when he took over three years ago, Strawn had hinted before the caucuses that he was seriously considering stepping down.

In his resignation announcement this morning, he doesn’t mention the controversy over Iowa’s excruciatingly close caucus count – an omission that could further irritate Santorum’s backers.

• Read Strawn’s letter to the Iowa Republican Party

• Strawn’s addendum to the letter

Calls for Strawn to leave have intensified in recent days. On Saturday, conservative leaders met at Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition president Steve Scheffler’s office to talk about electing principled conservatives as delegates for the GOP national convention, and the topic of Strawn stepping down came up, according to several in attendance, including Scheffler. The group, which included representatives from the Santorum and Ron Paul campaigns, but excluded Mitt Romney’s team, talked about either pressuring Strawn to resign or rounding up the nine necessary state central committee votes to fire him, although that wasn’t the purpose of the meeting, they said.

The dissatisfaction with Strawn dates to caucus night, when, after chasing down results from all 1,774 precincts, Strawn took to the microphones at about 1:30 a.m. to say that Romney had 30,015 votes – just eight more than Santorum’s 30,007.

“Congratulations to Governor Mitt Romney, winner of the 2012 Iowa caucuses,” Strawn he told the TV cameras. “Congratulations to Senator Santorum, for a very close second-place finish. An excellent race here.” He later said he felt pressure, given the national press scrutiny that night, to name a definitive winner.

Two and a half weeks later, GOP officials finished up a final vote tally based on the counts precinct leaders recorded on Jan. 3 on the official party document called a Form E.

This certified result showed Santorum up by 34 votes – but Strawn on Jan. 19 said the race was too close to call.

Although the results reported by those eight precincts on caucus night showed Santorum was the clear winner, Strawn said he couldn’t trust those numbers because GOP officials had found typos in 131 other precincts’ caucus-night results.

Santorum backers led an outcry – and others have joined the chorus – saying Strawn’s refusal to name Santorum the outright winner was evidence of bias. The chairman had promised to stay neutral to give all candidates a fair shot.

The Des Moines Register negotiated for an exclusive on breaking the certified results, but Strawn’s detractors accused him of trying to frame the story in a way that deprived Santorum of much-deserved publicity for a No. 1 finish.

Strawn has said he was trying to protect the integrity of the caucus process by being cautious with the certified results, and was unprepared for criticism that targeted him personally. The state central committee met late on Jan. 20, a Friday night, to demand a news release declaring Santorum the official victor.

The reversal brought down a hailstorm of negative attention on the Iowa GOP, including speculation that the fumble could jeopardize Iowa’s role as the first state to vote in the presidential nominating contest every four years.

Last week, Strawn met with Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad’s chief of staff, Jeff Boeyink, who said he and the governor would support him whether he stayed or left.

“We want Matt to be successful in whatever he does,” Boeyink, who Strawn tapped in 2009 as the party’s executive director, told the Register this morning. “Matt Strawn has done a tremendous job with the party and the governor had hoped that he would continue to serve.”

During Branstad’s weekly news conference a week ago, when asked about the calls for Strawn’s resignation, the governor said the GOP chief has done a “great job” under “difficult circumstances.”

This morning, Branstad in a statement said: “Matt took over at a time when the party was in desperate shape, and rebuilt it precinct-by-precinct, putting it in the strongest position in years. … Matt’s leadership will be missed, but I am confident a smooth transition will take place at the Republican Party of Iowa and we will continue our party’s successes this November.”

Other Republicans, including the GOP leaders in the Iowa Legislature, have also defended the Republican Party of Iowa’s handling of the Iowa caucus voting process.

Senate Minority Leader Jerry Behn, R-Boone, in a statement this morning thanked Strawn for his “tireless dedication to the cause of promoting our great party, its values, principles and candidates.”

Former party chairman Steve Grubbs this morning said: “Matt Strawn has been a very effective chairman for the Republican Party of Iowa. Two years ago he lead the party to historic wins. For Republicans to turn on him now is very shortsighted.”

Grubbs, of Davenport, said Iowa Republicans created the caucus process in the 1970s, which is non-binding, with looser vote-counting procedures than typical elections. “Ultimately, it was bound to have problems, and the fact that it happened on Matt Strawn’s watch is less his problem and more the problem Iowa Republican need to tackle in the next three years,” Grubbs told the Register.

Strawn, who has done dozens of TV interviews as the public face of Iowa GOP party politics, also released this morning a goodbye video telling Iowans it was an “honor, privilege and an opportunity of a lifetime” to be their chairman.

He said Republicans in Iowa together gained ground since he began as chairman in January 2009 – the caucuses remained first in the nation, and turnout this year was the highest ever; the party broke fundraising records and hosted three nationally televised GOP presidential debates in Iowa; and Republican statewide celebrated victories, including in the Iowa House and governor’s mansion.

“Simply put, your Iowa GOP is better off than it was four years ago thanks to outstanding teamwork,” Strawn said.

In his resignation letter, Strawn said the chairman job is a volunteer position, but he has treated it as “a full-time calling.”

“There’s no question the job of rebuilding our party was a huge one, and one to which I committed every minute that was necessary to succeed,” he wrote. “It is only because the Iowa GOP has returned as a strong and relevant voice in Iowa politics that I am now able to evaluate all the competing priorities in my personal, business and political life.”

Strawn, a married father of three young children, is the co-owner of the Iowa Barnstormers, the Des Moines-based Arena Football League team. He’s also a founding partner of an Ankeny-based public relations and capital development firm, and is a part of the management of his family’s farm in eastern Iowa.

Asked about his reaction to criticism about how he handled the caucus results, Strawn told the Register this morning: “We’ll let the record stand for itself.”

A SHORT HISTORY

JOB DESCRIPTION: In a state with warring Republican factions, the state GOP chairman is the central figure, tasked with uniting and strengthening Iowa’s 99 county-level party organizations. The job is part cheerleader and part fundraiser. It involves lobbying the Republican National Committee for Iowa’s leadoff presidential nominating caucuses.

PREVIOUS CHAIRS: Two-term GOP Chairman Ray Hoffmann stepped down in January 2008 amid criticism by some party leaders that the Sioux City businessman was not as focused on the party’s election-year needs as he should have been. Stewart Iverson, a popular former Iowa Senate leader, took over after Hoffmann, and in February that year fired the GOP’s executive director, Chuck Laudner, and political director, Craig Robinson. Iverson didn’t seek re-election after his first year.

JANUARY 2009: Strawn, who helped breathe life into the Iowa Barnstormers football team, took the reins of the beleaguered Iowa Republican Party. The GOP in Iowa had ended 2008 much like its national counterpart: dispirited. John McCain lost Iowa by 9 percentage points. Republicans lost seats in the Iowa House and Senate. The party faced a widening deficit in voter registration in comparison to Democrats.

RISE AND FALL: Iowa Republicans have credited Strawn with revitalizing the party, keeping the peace between social conservatives and business-oriented Republicans, paying off debt, growing the GOP voter rolls, and making much-needed technology and building improvements at party headquarters. But he has faced sharp criticism in recent days from some conservatives, including Robinson, now editor of the influential website TheIowaRepublican.com, for his handling of the caucus results.

Isabella was born with a  serious genetic disorder known as Trisomy 18. More than 90 percent of infants with the disorder die before their first birthday.

Hogan Gidley, national communications director for Santorum’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, said in a statement that Santorum will cancel his Sunday morning campaign schedule in Florida. “However, Rick intends to return to Floriuda and resume the campaign schedule as soon as is possible,” he added.

The campaign did not release any additional details about the child’s condition.

Isabella Santorum accompanied Rick and Karen Santorum to Iowa last summer when the Santorum family – which includes seven children – spent three weeks here prior to the Ames straw poll. However, Isabella did not accompany her six siblings when the Santorum family returned to Iowa in December prior to the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses.

Five other official documents that the Republican Party of Iowa requires precinct leaders to fill out on caucus night come in triplicate — with a white top sheet and pink and yellow carbon copies underneath.

But the Form E doesn’t. That’s the document that precinct leaders must use to write down vote totals for each candidate, then sign and mail to party headquarters for certification.

“Why the Form E, which is the utmost critical one, why that’s not in triplicate is beyond me,” John Rowe, the GOP chairman in Cerro Gordo County, told The Des Moines Register.

Karen Zander, the GOP chairwoman in Franklin County, said: “The Form E is just one sheet of paper. And it’s white. It’s not fluorescent pink or a bright color of any kind.”

As with all other paperwork filled out in triplicate on caucus night, one copy would stay with the county chair, one would go to the county auditor and one would go to the state party.

On caucus night, county leaders reported vote totals from all 1,774 precincts, and the numbers gave Mitt Romney an eight-vote victory over Rick Santorum.

About 2½ weeks later, when GOP officials finished adding the votes spelled out on the Form Es, they discovered typos in the vote counts from 131 precincts, and Santorum was 34 votes ahead. But ballots in eight precincts weren’t counted because volunteers in those communities failed to turn in the paperwork.

At first, GOP officials said the full actual results would never be known because the margin was so narrow and there were so many typos in other precincts’ tallies that the numbers those eight precincts reported on caucus night couldn’t be trusted.

A couple of days later, compelled by the state central committee, GOP Chairman Matt Strawn declared Santorum the official winner of the 2012 Iowa caucuses.

Iowa quickly became the target of scorn for its counting debacle, and Strawn has faced pressure to step down.

As Republicans in Iowa hash out how to make the vote count more reliable, they’ve considered asking the party to pay someone $500 a month or so to oversee and coordinate each county. But the charm of the caucuses is that they are a volunteer-driven operation, said Kathy Bobst, the GOP treasurer in Franklin County.

Republicans have also talked about using voting machines, but concluded that would make Iowa’s vote dangerously close to a primary — and New Hampshire jealously guards its role in hosting the nation’s first primary.

Several Iowans said people shouldn’t overreact just because of one close vote count.

They noted that all but 0.45 percent of the precincts were included in the certification.

Don Lucas, GOP chairman in Lee County, pointed out that party leaders certified more precincts than in any other caucus in history. The closeness of the result is what’s at issue, he said, and the process would have won praise from caucus- watchers if there had been a more substantial margin of victory.

“In any system that large, there’s going to be a few mistakes with the unbelievably small margin of error we’re talking about,” he said.

Missing precinct: Precinct 5 EM-ES (not Estherville Ward 2, as party officials reported, according to Emmet County GOP Chairwoman Deb Satern).

Vote count: Santorum 8, Paul 5, Bachmann 4, Gingrich 4, Perry 4, Romney 3, according to what the party reported on caucus night.

Why the Form E was missing: “I don’t know,” Satern said. She declined to name the chair for that precinct. “It’s hard to get volunteers. Just because someone made a mistake, I don’t want them to say, ‘Well, I’m just walking away.’”

What happened that night: All 11 precincts in Emmet County were together in one building, at Estherville Lincoln Central High School. The precinct leaders brought Satern the vote count on unofficial pieces of paper. As two witnesses watched, Satern typed in the results using the party’s password-protected website. Later, the precinct leaders left their official paperwork on their individual tables, and a volunteer collected it for Satern.

Her uncle died Jan. 8, so she asked a volunteer to mail everything to party headquarters. Ten arrived in Des Moines via UPS; one didn’t. Her company makes rifle barrels; she left for an industry trade show in Las Vegas on Jan. 16, believing all paperwork was in order.

Satern said she has no idea what the vote count was for this precinct. “All my other packets have the ballots in them, but this one does not,” she said.

How to improve the caucuses: Satern suggests taking a picture of the Form E and emailing it to party officials on caucus night.

POCAHONTAS

Missing precinct: Center-South Roosevelt-North Lincoln

Vote count: Santorum 8, Perry 7, Paul 1, Romney 1, according to GOP Chairman Michael Ryan of Pocahontas. “I have the ballots,” he said. “I’m looking at them right in front of me.” They’re the same numbers the party reported on caucus night.

Why the Form E was missing: “The form did not get back to me. I had it in my hand, and I gave it to my precinct person, and it didn’t get back to me,” Ryan said. He declined to name the person. “They can’t find it. I talked to them,” he said.

What happened that night: This precinct met at the Prairie Lakes Area Education Agency building with two other precincts. Ryan oversaw the counting of all three precincts, at one table, along with volunteers Julie Storr and Renee Olson.

Representatives from the Perry and Santorum campaigns, and a reporter for the Pocahontas Record-Democrat, Jamie Whitney, watched the counting.

“I made sure when we did the counting that we were accurate,” Ryan said.

Ballots for each precinct had a different color. They were divided into piles by precinct and by candidate. A precinct secretary called in the results, Ryan said.

Whitney said he can’t verify the numbers because Ryan gave him combined totals for the three precincts.

How to improve the caucuses: “It would be nice (to have voting machines) just because the fiasco happened for me of not getting the form ,” Ryan said. He also thinks Form E should be in triplicate, and that would do the trick.

FRANKLIN

Missing precinct: Geneva-Reeve

Vote count: Paul 10, Santorum 3, Perry 3, Gingrich 2, Romney 1, according to GOP Chairwoman Karen Zander of Latimer. Those are the same numbers the party reported on caucus night.

Why the Form E was missing: It’s unclear.

Zander, who was overseeing her first caucus, said she collected the paperwork from the county’s 17 precincts in separate manila envelopes. She didn’t check to see whether each Form E was there before she mailed everything to party headquarters. “It could’ve gotten lost at the state,” she said.

But she added: “I’m sorry. I feel bad. I took responsibility for the missing paper.”

What happened that night: All the precincts met at four sites, with one chair for each site. When the votes were done, the four chairs called Zander with the numbers, and she submitted them via the party’s password-protected website. She believed her numbers were correct because the check-in paperwork showed 475 eligible voters signed in, and her vote count totaled 475, she said.

How to improve the caucuses: As for voting machines, “it would take the weight off my shoulders, but I don’t think it’s necessary,” Zander said. “There’s nothing wrong with a piece of paper. You have two or three people count it, and you report it. That’s about as honest and as quick as you can get.”

CERRO GORDO

Missing precinct: Mason City Ward 2 Precinct 3

Vote count: Paul 8, Bachmann 7, Santorum 4, Perry 2, Romney 1, according to GOP Chairman John Rowe of Mason City. Those are the same figures the party posted on caucus night.

Why the Form E was missing: “All my stuff was in order when I sent it in a sealed box with delivery confirmation,” Rowe said. “When they opened up that box in Des Moines and spread it out on the table, I can’t verify what happened down there. I would argue that when they were unstacking it out of the box, one piece of paper slid somewhere, and it’s there.”

What happened that night: Two county auditor staffers were hired to help with voter registration at sites in Mason City and Clear Lake, and they stuck around for the counting. Rowe said he still has the ballots, with each of the 26 precincts in a separate envelope, along with the unofficial tally sheets from caucus night. He personally organized all the paperwork, a 12-inch stack, and mailed it himself.

How to improve the caucuses: “It can’t be any more transparent,” Rowe said. “There’s no backroom dealings. And we take it very seriously.” But the Form Es should come with carbon copy backups, he said. “Why the Form E, which is the utmost critical one, why that’s not in triplicate is beyond me,” he said.

LEE

Missing precinct: Fort Madison 4A

Vote count: Paul 9, Romney 7, Santorum 6, Gingrich 5, Huntsman 1, according to what the party reported on caucus night.

Missing precinct: Fort Madison 4B

Vote count: Paul 4, Gingrich 3, Santorum 1, according to what the party reported on caucus night.

Missing precinct: Franklin-Cedar-Marion

Vote count: Santorum 22, Romney 14, Paul 7, Gingrich 5, Perry 4, Bachmann 1, according to what the party reported on caucus night.

Missing precinct: Washington-Green Bay-Denmark

Vote count: Santorum 30, Paul 22, Gingrich 14, Romney 13, Perry 10, Bachmann 3, Huntsman 1, according to what the party reported on caucus night.

Why four Form Es were missing: Two were lost — the ones from the Franklin and Washington precincts, said GOP Chairman Don Lucas.

“I don’t know what happened to them,” Lucas said. Neither do the precinct chairs, he said.

“It wasn’t because we didn’t have legitimate people doing it. These are very honest people that you go to church with and go fishing with. There was no attempt at fraud or anything.”

And the Form Es from two — the missing Fort Madison ones — were turned in without any numbers on them, Lucas said.

When he discovered this after caucus night, “basically I didn’t feel it was ethically right to fill it out and have someone else sign it,” Lucas said.

He didn’t mail those two forms to state headquarters.

What happened that night: The vote counts were tallied on unofficial pieces of paper and submitted by computer to the party’s password-protected website, Lucas said.

James Creen, the precinct chair for the two Fort Madison precincts, said the secretaries left that night before the paperwork was filled out.

Members of the press and a class of political science students witnessed the counting, Creen said.

“With that many people looking over the shoulder, it would’ve been very difficult to modify any of the numbers,” he said.

Sue Dyer, a precinct secretary who was the first to notice one of the Form Es was missing, said she believes the results reported on caucus night are accurate.

“What I don’t like is how the news media is making this into some kind of a villain story and saying we were cheating. It’s like, ‘Oh my God, are you kidding me?’” she said.

How to improve the caucuses: “What other poll has a margin of error as close as what our poll came out to be?” Lucas said. “Part of the problem we had this time was the race was so close. In any system that large, there’s going to be a few mistakes with the margin of error we’re talking about. It’s unbelievably small.”

David Kochel said he intends to tell Florida voters about what he called Gingrich’s failure as U.S. House speaker, his work as a lobbyist on one of the largest spending bills in history, and “his unreliable leadership.”

“Newt finished a distant fourth in Iowa because voters came to know the real record behind his rhetoric,” he said in an email from the airport.

“You can’t attack Paul Ryan seated on a couch with Nancy Pelosi and call yourself a Reagan conservative,” added Kochel, a Republican from Des Moines. “It’s a sham, and when voters take a long look like they did in Iowa and New Hampshire, he finished fourth and fifth.”

Florida’s primary is a week away, on Jan. 31. Just four candidates remain in the GOP race – Romney, Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.

Gingrich, fresh from a victory in South Carolina, is gaining momentum in Florida, a new poll there shows.

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum braced for a setback and looked ahead to the Jan. 31 contest after getting the most votes in Iowa and besting Gingrich in New Hampshire. Texas Rep. Ron Paul made plans to focus on states where his libertarian, Internet-driven message might find more of a reception with voters; his campaign said it had purchased a substantial ad buy in Nevada and Minnesota, which hold caucuses next month.

The first contest without Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who dropped out this past week and endorsed Gingrich, was seen as Romney’s to lose just days ago. Instead, the gap closed quickly between the Massachusetts governor who portrays himself as the Republicans best positioned to defeat President Barack Obama and Gingrich, the confrontational former House speaker from Georgia.

Romney avoided a run-in with Gingrich at Tommy’s Country Ham House, where both had scheduled campaign events for the same time. Romney stopped by the breakfast restaurant 45 minutes ahead of schedule. When Gingrich arrived, just minutes after Romney’s bus left the parking lot, he said: “Where’s Mitt?”

Earlier, Gingrich had a message for voters during a stop at The Grapevine restaurant in Boiling Springs not long after the polls opened: Come out and vote for me if you want to help deny Romney nomination.

He told diners who were enjoying plates of eggs and grits that he was the “the only practical conservative vote” to the rival he called a Massachusetts moderate. “Polls are good, votes are better,” he said.

Gingrich also said he would put a stop to federal actions against South Carolina’s voter ID and immigration laws.

Romney’s agreement to participates in Florida debates Monday in Tampa and Thursday in Jacksonville was seen as an acknowledgement of a prolonged battle with Gingrich.

“This could be real close,” said Romney as he chatted on the phone with a voter Saturday morning and urged the man to go vote.

Before the ham house standoff that wasn’t, Romney stood outside his Greenville headquarters and undertook a new attack on Gingrich. He called on Gingrich to further explain his contracts with Freddie Mac, the housing giant, and release any advice he had provided to the company. He has said the contracts earned two of his companies more than $1.6 million over eight years, but that he only pocketed about $35,000 a year himself.

‘I’d like to see what he actually told Freddie Mac. Don’t you think we ought to see it?” Romney said.

It was another response to pressure on Romney to release his tax returns before Republican voters finish choosing a nominee.

A day earlier, Romney had called on Gingrich to release information related to an ethics investigation of Gingrich in the 1990s. Gingrich argues that GOP voters need to know whether the wealthy former venture capital executive’s records contain anything that could hurt the party’s chances against Obama.

Romney has said he will release several years’ worth of tax returns in April. Gingrich has called on him to release them much sooner. On Saturday, Romney refused to answer questions from reporters about the returns and whether his refusal to release them had hurt him with South Carolina voters.

Gingrich, buoyed by Perry’s endorsement as he left the race Thursday, has called Romney’s suggestion about releasing ethics investigation documents a “panic attack” brought on by sinking poll numbers.

The stakes were high for Saturday’s vote. The primary winner has gone on to win the Republican nomination in every election since 1980.

It’s very important, but it’s not do or die,” Paul told Fox News

Some of South Carolina’s notorious 11th-hour devilry — fake reports in the form of emails targeting Gingrich and his ex-wife Marianne — emerged in a race known as much for its nastiness as for its late-game twists.

“Unfortunately, we are now living up to our reputation,” said South Carolina GOP strategist Chip Felkel.

State Attorney Gen. Alan Wilson ordered a preliminary review of the phony messages to see if any laws had been broken.

Gingrich’s ex-wife burst into the campaign this week when she alleged in an ABC News interview that her former husband had asked her for an “open marriage,” a potentially damaging claim in a state where the Republican primary electorate includes a potent segment of Christian conservatives. The thrice-married Gingrich, who has admitted to marital infidelities, angrily denied her accusation.

The certified results released this week from the nation’s first presidential nominating contest revealed that Mitt Romney’s declared eight-vote victory on caucus night was actually a 34-vote defeat. They revealed that eight voting precincts went missing in action, and their votes will never be counted. And they were accompanied by evolving statements from the Republican Party of Iowa, which, having initially called the race for Romney, first declared this week’s result a “split decision” and only later acknowledged victory for Santorum.

Such a muddled result and response threatens the already-contested legitimacy of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status and underscores the need for reforms to professionalize the voting process, political observers and party officials said.

“It’s bad. It really hurts the caucuses,” longtime Iowa observer David Yepsen said. “The caucuses have lots of critics, and for this to happen really jeopardizes the future of the event.”

Criticism of Iowa’s place on the nominating calendar has long come from other states envious of the attention it receives, and has often focused on the demographic realities that make it unrepresentative of the country as a whole.

But this year’s fumbled result opens a new line of attack: that Iowa’s process is amateurish, and that its results cannot be trusted.

“Iowa was just indicted for not being able to add. We look silly,” said Yepsen, the director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and a former Des Moines Register columnist.

The Republican Party of Iowa issued this statement Friday night: “In order to clarify conflicting reports and to affirm the results released January 18 by the Republican Party of Iowa, Chairman Matthew Strawn and the State Central Committee declared Senator Rick Santorum the winner of the 2012 Iowa Caucus.”

Larry J. Sabato, a respected elections forecaster and director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, called the caucuses’ shifting results an “embarrassment.” His Twitter feed, he said, has been a running stream of anti-Iowa invective in recent days.

“People in a lot of other states are tired of Iowa going first, there’s no question about it,” he said. “And Iowa played right into the hands of its critics.”

A big question, though, is whether such frustration will actually drive a challenge to Iowa’s pre-eminence in presidential cycles to come.

In Yepsen’s view, this month’s “failure” (his word) certainly could prompt future candidates to shy away from Iowa and lead the media to discount its results.

Others weren’t so sure, though.

Drake University political scientist Dennis Goldford pointed to two factors in Iowa’s favor: Its botched results didn’t change the race in a meaningful way, and a debate over which state should succeed Iowa is almost surely more trouble than it’s worth.

“It’s easy to pile on Iowa and the system we have, but as much as you dislike it, it’s probably less unpleasant than what you get into with proposals to change it,” Goldford said.

It’s especially unclear how this month’s confusion will influence states that in the past have attempted to leapfrog Iowa for its first-in-the-nation status or the Republican National Committee, which polices the nominating process.

Officials in Florida, for example, have long claimed that its large and diverse population is a more representative sample of the U.S. electorate, and thus more worthy of an early date on the nominating calendar. It attempted to force the issue this year when it moved its primary to Jan. 31, prompting Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina to move their contests even earlier.

Republican Party of Florida spokesman Brian Hughes said Friday it was “way too early to think about what might happen four or eight years down the road,” but couldn’t resist taking a shot at Iowa’s first-in-the-nation claim.

“122,000 votes are cast, and it takes you two weeks to figure out who won?” Hughes said. “It does beg a question if that process makes a lot of sense.”

Florida, he noted, has already received more than 122,000 absentee ballots for its Republican primary, and expects total turnout to approach 2 million.

The Republican National Committee in the past has written a special rule allowing Iowa to schedule its caucuses ahead of most other states without penalty, but officials on Friday said it was far too early to predict how this year’s results would affect a similar rule in the future.

“All in all, we’re happy with the outcome from the caucuses,” RNC spokesman Ryan Mahoney said. “We had record turnout and a lot of enthusiasm from a state that’s going to be crucial in 2012.”

Several observers agreed, however, that changes will be critical if the Iowa caucuses are to remain relevant.

The 2012 contest, those observers said, revealed that while the caucuses have become a national focal point in the presidential election, their processes haven’t changed much since they were sleepy delegate-selection meetings.

“The problem is you have a counting system that’s based upon a caucus that occurred in 1976 when everybody went over to Martha’s house, sat around a potbelly stove, and she wrote down the numbers on a slip of paper and called them in,” Yepsen said.

Such an insular, volunteer-based, party-run system just doesn’t hold up under modern demands for accuracy and timeliness.

“The difficulty is that the caucuses have come to have a political weight on them that they really weren’t designed to have,” Goldford said.

Many options exist for buttressing the caucuses to withstand those pressures. Yepsen proposed professionalizing the voting process by bringing in county government to administer the balloting as they do in state and local elections.

Such a step would surely cost money, he said, but the state may find it a worthwhile investment if it ensures the continuation of the caucuses as a national political spectacle.

Sabato, the election forecaster, agreed. Nothing underscores skepticism about the caucuses like the notion of handwritten, hand-counted ballots.

“They have to tighten their procedures,” Sabato said. “Little pieces of paper aren’t good enough.”

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Ia., called for tighter security and improved reporting of caucus results Friday during an appearance on Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press” program.

The party has three years to fix the problems and should start working, Grassley said.

Craig Robinson, the editor of TheIowaRepublican.com website and a former state party official, suggested technological tweaks could improve caucus night returns and provide more accurate and timely certified results.

Hiring telemarketing firms to double-check results or even just requiring precinct officials to photograph their final vote tallies could bring more security to the process, he said.

But Robinson has been especially critical of Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Matt Strawn since the certified results were released, castigating him for declining to immediately declare Santorum the winner and calling for his resignation.

“I think Matt Strawn himself has done more damage to Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status than any outside force ever could,” Robinson said. “The reason why is because he has cast doubt on the process.”

TheIowaRepublican.com’s biggest funder/advertiser is the American Future Fund, which is run by Iowa GOP operative Nick Ryan, a Santorum consultant who left the campaign to start a pro-Santorum super PAC called Red White & Blue.

In a statement provided to the Register on Friday, Strawn acknowledged there was “room for improvement” in the party’s caucus organization.

“We will be soliciting feedback and input from voters, volunteers and Republican stakeholders in the coming weeks and months on ways to ensure Iowans and the nation have confidence in the caucus results and processes,” Strawn said in the statement.

— The Associated Press contributed to this report.

— The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Reactions to Rick Perry’s campaign suspension on Thursday from Iowans who supported him were mixed.

“It was time,” said Kenny Van Dusseldorp, 56, from Pella. Van Dusseldorp told The Des Moines Register before the Iowa caucuses that his mind was made up in support of the Texas governor. After Perry continued on past Iowa, Van Dusselrop’s mind changed.

“Some of his statements once he got to New Hampshire about Iowans I didn’t appreciate very much,” he said. “You know, we’re not a flyover state.”

Just before he left Iowa in early January, Perry called the caucuses a “loosey-goosey process.”

Van Dusseldorp said he wouldn’t fall in line with Perry’s endorsement to back House Speaker Newt Gingrich. He said he’s looking at Mitt Romney, though Van Dusseldorp voted for Barack Obama for president in 2008.

Bob Haus, the Iowa co-chair for Perry’s Iowa campaign, said he heard about Perry’s Gingrich endorsement no earlier than the general public. It was too soon to decide if he’d support Gingrich, too, he said.

“When these campaigns end, there’s a natural process of mourning, if you will. It’s too early for me to say anything at this point,” he said. “They make sense, philosophically.”

Haus called his former boss “a guy who hates to give up” and said he often makes quick decisions, factors that played into Perry’s decision to continue past the caucuses despite a poor showing.

Phil Smith, a 58-year-old independent voter from Hartley, stood behind Perry up until his announcement today, but said he saw the dropout coming.

“He wasn’t holding too much in the polls, so I didn’t figure it was going to be too long,” he said.

Smith said Perry’s role as an “outsider” will go unfilled by current candidates, any of whom he’d support over Obama.

“At this point I’m just going to watch the race,” he said.