Peltola extends lead over Sullivan in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race as ballot-counting continues

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mary Peltola extended her lead over incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan in an updated vote total published Monday by the Alaska Division of Elections.

While Peltola has had more first-choice votes since Election Day, preliminary calculations by the Alaska Beacon have shown Sullivan leading when the results of the state’s ranked choice runoff are considered.

But on Monday, Peltola gained enough first-choice votes to outweigh Sullivan’s runoff advantage. As of 4 p.m., she led Sullivan by 2,517 votes out of 219,342 cast. Republican candidate Gerald Heikes and independent Dan J. Sullivan were a distant third and fourth, respectively.

Under Alaska’s election system, if one candidate in a race has more than 50% of the first-choice votes, they win. If no candidate does, a ranked choice runoff is used to decide the winner.

The candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and voters who picked them have their votes go to their second choices.

The elimination process continues until two candidates are left, and the person with the most votes wins.

Preliminary calculations from Election Day showed Sen. Sullivan would gain more than enough votes from that redistribution to overcome Peltola’s lead.

But with Monday’s update, Peltola has a big enough advantage in first-choice votes to overcome the Sullivan redistribution.

With 48.5% of the first choice votes, she is also coming closer to the threshold needed to win the race without the runoff. 

That could change on Tuesday.

Altogether, the division added 4,947 counted ballots to the statewide tally on Monday, but tens of thousands of ballots are expected to be added to the tally on Tuesday as the division includes absentee and early votes received in the days immediately before Election Day.

Those ballots were withheld while elections officials cross-checked Election Day poll registers to prevent Alaskans from casting two votes.

The scheduled update on Tuesday could be decisive for more than just the U.S. Senate race. In the governor’s race, Democratic candidate Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins had 49.4% of first-choice votes on Monday.

Republican governor candidate Dave Bronson, running in third place, said last week that Kreiss-Tomkins’ victory appears inevitable. Republican candidate Bernadette Wilson, in second with 28.8% of first-choice votes, has not yet conceded the race.

In the race for U.S. House, incumbent Republican Rep. Nick Begich III has 49.1% of the first-choice votes, well ahead of independent challenger Bill Hill, with 40.7%. Democratic candidate Eric Hafner, a federal inmate in New York state, has 7.3%. 

Ballot Measure 2, seeking to repeal the state’s open-primary and ranked-choice election system, continues to trail, with 52.3% of participating voters choosing “no.”