Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy said the state's U.S. Senate race between Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan and Democratic challenger Mary Peltola remains very close as election workers continued to collect and count ballots days after the midterm elections.1,3
“It's very close,” Dunleavy, a Republican, said in an interview with John Catsimatidis on WABC radio, giving an update on what lies ahead in the process of counting votes. The race is one of the only national contests still unresolved, with about three-fourths of the votes tallied and Sullivan trailing Peltola by just over 600 votes, or three tenths of a percentage point.1,3
The state had collected approximately 215,000 votes in the preliminary results released this week. The two remaining candidates trailed further behind with just a couple of percentage points each, and only about four percent of ballots ranked someone other than Peltola or Sullivan first.3
Alaska uses a ranked-choice ballot for its general elections, listing up to four candidates for each office regardless of party affiliation. Voters rank the candidates in order of preference, and if no one receives an outright majority when the votes are counted, the lowest performer is eliminated and all of those ballots are retallied and assigned to their second choices.3
Counting in the large and mostly rural state takes time. The state must count all ballots by November 18, 15 days after Election Day, and it has another seven days to certify the results. The available data includes all but about 10,000 ballots that could not be scanned electronically and must be counted by hand.3
The race received intense scrutiny in its final days after it came to light that the Peltola campaign and other Democrats recruited current fourth-place finisher Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. specifically to siphon votes from Republicans confused about which Dan Sullivan to vote for. President Donald Trump called for Peltola and the other Sullivan to be criminally prosecuted, and the Department of Justice sued, asking the state to set aside ballots that picked the non-incumbent Sullivan. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit earlier this week.3
An analysis of the preliminary data by The New York Times suggested that voters who backed the other Sullivan did so not out of confusion, but to vote against the incumbent. “Mr. Sullivan might not even claw back half of a point in ranked-choice tabulation, which would not be enough to overcome Ms. Peltola's expected advantage,” the Times reported. “One reason Mr. Sullivan doesn't fare better is that more of the voters who backed the other Dan Sullivan…ranked Ms. Peltola as their second choice rather than Mr. Sullivan.”3
Of those who picked the other Sullivan, over one-third left the rest blank, nearly 30 percent picked Peltola second, and 16 percent and 18 percent picked the incumbent Sullivan and fellow Republican Gerald Heikes, respectively. Of the voters who picked Heikes first, 36 percent picked Sullivan second and a nearly identical amount left the rest blank, while 14 percent picked the other Sullivan and 12 percent chose Peltola.3
That pattern suggests at least 16 percent, and perhaps as many as 34 percent, of voters followed the senator's advice to list all the candidates other than Peltola and let the process sort it out. It also indicates nearly three in 10 voters who picked the other Sullivan ranked Peltola second. Were the 36 percent who picked the other Sullivan and nobody else protest votes, or confused voters?3
Trump has said the totals for the other candidates should be moved to the incumbent and the contest ended. “The vote totals for the Fake Dan Sullivan, plus the other 'slug' that the Dems put on the Ballot, should be immediately given to the REAL Dan Sullivan, and the Election is over - He easily wins,” the president wrote on Truth Social. Trump also declared the race over in favor of the Republican candidate.2,3
“There is no other fair solution!” Trump wrote. But the analysis found that even if all of the voters who voted for Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. and did not rank a second choice at all had actually intended to vote for the incumbent, “he would only gain about one percentage point in vote margin—an increase that would not offset Ms. Peltola's expected gains from uncounted mail vote.” More votes remain to be counted before the November 18 deadline.3
