The Alaska Division of Elections will announce the unofficial winner of the special election to replace Congressman Don Young in a 4 p.m. livestream today. (via AlaskaBeacon)
The Division of Elections declined to replace him with the No. 5 finisher, Republican Tara Sweeney, a decision That left Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III, plus Democratic candidate Mary Peltola.
That’s only possible, however, because of a massive effort to collect and scan about 192,000 ballots cast in this election. At 131 other voting stations — mostly in rural Alaska — voters dropped their ballots into a box without a scanner. At the end of the night, voting officials hand-counted the ballots and called the results into one of five regional offices. Right now, the process isn’t a fast one — on Tuesday afternoon, temporary workers and a member of the division’s full-time staff were feeding the ballots, one by one, through a scanner.
Questioned ballots — those flagged for special attention for one of a variety of reasons — have gone through a similar review process. If one of the three candidates had more than 50% of the vote, they’d win automatically, with no ranking needed. That isn’t the case here. Ranking is needed. The software then looks at the totals for each candidate. If a candidate has more than 50% of the remaining votes — the number cast, minus the number of votes for “no one” — they will win.
It isn’t clear whether that will happen. Peltola has more first-choice votes than Palin, and if enough Begich voters pick Peltola or no one, Peltola will win.
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