USAupdated 12m ago3 min read
Mary Peltola Extends Lead Over Dan Sullivan After Alaska Senate Ballot Count
“Peltola is also now less than one percentage point away from passing the 50% threshold”
“Neither candidate is above 50%, so the race remains on track for ranked-choice tabulation”
This article is an automated aggregation of coverage from news outlets. Our editorials offer in-depth analysis curated by the NewsCord team.
Peltola widened her Alaska Senate lead after additional ballot counts. Ballots counted exceeded 256,000; Peltola leads Sullivan by about 5,800 votes.
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Alaska Senate race stays open
Alaska’s Division of Elections tallied an additional 5,000 ballots on Thursday, bringing the total number of ballots counted to over 256,000 and extending Democrat Mary Peltola’s lead over Republican U.S. Sen. Dan S. Sullivan in the Alaska Senate race.
Peltola had 49.1% of first-choice votes after Thursday’s ballot count, while Sullivan had 46.8%, and Peltola’s lead grew to 5,800 votes, about 1,825 votes more than her lead on Wednesday.
The Alaska Senate race remained uncalled as officials expected to have counted all eligible ballots by Nov. 18, and the state would use ranked-choice tabulation if no candidate gets more than 50% of the first-choice votes.
In the governor’s race, Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins had over 50% of first-choice votes after the latest ballot count, ahead of three Republican candidates, and the Alaska Division of Elections released Thursday results that added 5,723 early, absentee and questioned ballots primarily from Southeast.
A ballot measure seeking to repeal Alaska’s election system failed to pass with 52.8% of voters against it, while a separate measure affirming an existing requirement that Alaska voters be U.S. citizens was on track to pass with 68.9% voting in favor of it.
Ballots move by air
Alaska Seaplanes carried ballots across the state as part of a logistical puzzle that sees Alaskans’ midterms votes cast by mail and in person carried across Alaska by water and air rather than roads.
Andy Kline, the marketing director of Alaska Seaplanes, said, "We do feel a sense of pride of making sure we do the job right - the really complicated job of getting all these ballots across thousands of miles in Alaska," and he added, "We feel like we're part of the last leg of that journey of those ballots."
Charles Stewart, an election expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said election officials had "chosen to err on the side of getting it right rather than a rush to report the second and third tranches of ballots that get counted" as mail ballots can arrive up to 10 days later or 15 days for overseas voters if postmarked by election day.
Election officials planned to complete scanning and counting in Juneau, and the BBC described that smaller or more remote parts of Alaska can require ballots to be sealed in special envelopes or containers and sent through the mail.
The BBC said the ranked-choice tabulation would re-allocate votes from the lowest-scoring candidates to their voters’ second choices if no candidate gets more than 50% in the first round, with Alaska then declaring a winner for the Senate race, governor and the U.S. House of Representatives.
Court fight over rejected ballots
An Alaska judge ruled against the Peltola campaign’s request for a list of absentee voters whose ballots were rejected, and the ruling said the demand was "simply not reasonable" while election officials continued counting votes.
Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews sided with the Alaska Division of Elections, finding the agency is "currently busy processing ballots from the 2026 general election" and "simply lacks the capacity to generate the report" from the voter registration database.
The state argued that producing the records would violate voter privacy, and Assistant Attorney General Margaret Paton-Walsh said, "Voters have a privacy interest in that because people who want to vote absentee presumably don’t want to mess it up and don’t want to be publicly exposed as having messed that up."
The BBC also described that a judge denied an attempt by Peltola’s campaign to get information about how many absentee ballots election officials rejected, and it said the state argued it had no obligation to share this data and that doing so would violate voter privacy.
The Fox News report said the Sullivan campaign was allowed to intervene, and it described that neither candidate was above 50%, leaving the race on track for ranked-choice tabulation after absentee counting concludes around Nov. 18 with certification expected Nov. 25.