Alaska’s Senate Race Heads to a Ranked-Choice Count With Peltola 2,517 First-Choice Votes Ahead

Mary Peltola led Senator Dan Sullivan by 2,517 first-choice votes in Alaska’s uncalled Senate race on Monday, short of a majority, so 8,516 ballots for two minor candidates are set to be redistributed in a ranked-choice count on 18 November.

One of those two candidates is also called Dan Sullivan. Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., of Petersburg, finished fourth with 3,651 votes; Gerald Heikes, a Republican from Palmer, was third with 4,865, the Anchorage Daily News reported after Monday’s update. Ms Peltola, a Democrat, had 106,321 votes, or 48.6 per cent, and the Republican senator 103,804, or 47.5 per cent. Her lead had been 637 votes before the update.

How does Alaska’s count decide the seat?

By eliminating candidates from the bottom until someone has more than half of the ballots still in play. If no one passes 50 per cent of first choices once counting ends, the last-place candidate is dropped and each of that candidate’s ballots moves to the voter’s next choice, the ADN explained, and the process repeats. A ballot that ranks no one else stops counting. The last ballots are due to be counted on 18 November and certification is expected on 25 November. Domestic mail ballots may arrive until 13 November and overseas ballots until 18 November, Newsweek reported.

The order of elimination matters here. Mr Sullivan Jr. goes first, then Mr Heikes, and the final round is between the two leaders.

What do the second choices do to the lead?

On Monday’s numbers, probably not enough to reverse it. Newsweek published transfer rates drawn from the rankings on 204,530 machine-scanned ballots, the ones whose full rankings the state releases. Of Mr Sullivan Jr.’s voters, about 29 per cent ranked Ms Peltola next, 16 per cent the senator, 18 per cent Mr Heikes and 37 per cent no one else. Of Mr Heikes’s ballots, including those passed to him, about 43 per cent went to the senator, 17 per cent to Ms Peltola and 39 per cent to no one. Applied to Sunday’s count, those rates gave Senator Sullivan a projected win by about 333 votes.

This publication applied the same rates to Monday’s first-choice figures. The result runs the other way.

The figures are rounded projections, not results. They leave out roughly 700 write-in votes, which Newsweek estimated would split nearly evenly, and they assume the ballots counted after 4 November rank candidates the way the earlier ones did. On those assumptions the transfers net the senator about 960 votes, fewer than half of Ms Peltola’s first-choice lead, and she finishes with 50.4 per cent of the two-candidate total. For the senator to overtake her on transfers alone, if every one of the 8,516 minor-candidate ballots ranked one of the two leaders, he would need about 65 per cent of them. That is our arithmetic.

The larger unknown is the ballots not yet counted. Newsweek put the early and absentee ballots in hand but uncounted at about 51,000 on Sunday; the ADN said Monday’s update added about 5,000 to the total. That leaves something like 46,000 by our subtraction, before late mail. Ms Peltola’s campaign manager, Cheryl Bruce, said about 68 per cent of Monday’s counted votes went to Ms Peltola. That is a campaign’s figure, and this publication has not checked it against the state’s tables, which could not be opened on Tuesday.

Why does the second Dan Sullivan matter?

Because the Justice Department built a lawsuit around him. Its suit asked a federal court to stop certification if the senator lost and would have won had every vote for Mr Sullivan Jr. gone to him instead. Judge Sharon Gleason dismissed it on 1 November, holding that commingled secret ballots cannot be sorted by voter; the department has appealed. The theory had been amended five days before the election to add a Supremacy Clause claim.

Monday’s numbers put that theory’s test in plain view. Add all 3,651 of Mr Sullivan Jr.’s first-choice votes to the senator and he would lead by 1,134, by this publication’s arithmetic. The rankings his voters actually filled in point the other way: on Newsweek’s figures, more of them chose Ms Peltola second than chose the senator. That is the difference between a counterfactual and a count. Governor Mike Dunleavy has ordered an investigation into claims that Ms Peltola’s allies recruited Mr Sullivan Jr., and both sides deny it, Newsweek reported. In court, state officials said they had “carefully designed the ballot to minimize voter confusion.”

The race has also drawn the President. “They stole it,” Mr Trump said of Alaska at a briefing, adding that the race “should be called right now, because Dan Sullivan won easily if you add up the numbers,” USA Today reported. At that point the senator trailed on first choices, and no ranked ballot had been tabulated. His wider claim about early-vote counting is examined in a separate piece.

Both campaigns are also in court over rejected ballots. Ms Peltola’s campaign has sued the state for data on rejected absentee ballots, and the Sullivan campaign has sought to join the case in Anchorage Superior Court, the ADN reported. Any ballot that case restores would enter the first round, before any of the transfers above.

The next fixed date is Friday 13 November, the last day for domestic mail ballots to arrive. The tabulation follows on Wednesday 18 November.