Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mary Peltola increased her lead over incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan in an updated vote total released Monday by the Alaska Division of Elections.
Even if Peltola had more first choice votes since Election Day, preliminary calculations from the Alaska Beacon have shown Sullivan in the lead when the results of the state’s ranked choice runoff are considered.
But on Monday, Peltola secured enough first-choice votes to offset Sullivan’s advantage in the runoff. As of 4 p.m., she was ahead of Sullivan by 2,517 votes out of 219,342 votes cast. Republican candidate Gerald Heikes and independent Dan J. Sullivan were third and fourth, respectively.
Under Alaska’s election system, if a candidate in a race gets more than 50 percent of the first-choice votes, they win. If no candidate does so, a ranked second round of selection is used to determine the winner.
The candidate with the fewest first choice votes is eliminated and the voters who chose him see their votes go to their second choice.
The elimination process continues until only two candidates remain and the one with the most votes wins.
Preliminary Election Day Calculations showed that Senator Sullivan would gain more than enough votes through this redistribution to overcome Peltola’s lead.
But with Monday’s update, Peltola has a big enough advantage in first-choice votes to overcome Sullivan’s redistribution.
With 48.5% of the first-choice votes, she is also getting close to the threshold needed to win the race without a runoff.
That could change on Tuesday.
In total, the division added 4,947 counted ballots to Monday’s statewide tally, but tens of thousands of ballots are expected to be added to Tuesday’s tally because the division includes absentee and early ballots received in the days immediately preceding Election Day.
Those ballots were withheld while election officials audited Election Day voter records to prevent Alaskans from voting twice.
The update scheduled for Tuesday could be decisive for more than just the U.S. Senate race. In the race for governor, Democratic candidate Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins received 49.4% of the primary vote Monday.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Dave Bronson, running for third place, said last week that Kreiss-Tomkins’ victory seemed inevitable. Republican candidate Bernadette Wilson, second with 28.8% of the first-choice votes, has not yet conceded the race.
In the race for the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican incumbent Nick Begich III has 49.1% of the primary vote, well ahead of his independent challenger Bill Hill, with 40.7%. Democratic candidate Eric Hafner, a federal inmate in New York state, received 7.3%.
Ballot Measure 2, aimed at repealing the state’s system of open, ranked-choice primary elections, continues to lag, with 52.3% of participating voters choosing “no.”
Gn headline
