Murkowski on track to win
With the majority of write-in ballots opened and counted, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski appeared Saturday to be on track to win reelection over Republican Joe Miller.
Murkowski has won 89.5 percent of the write-in ballots outright, plus another 8 percent that were challenged but counted for the senator anyway. The fate of those challenged ballots will be decided in the coming weeks pending court orders.
Election officials are scheduled to finish counting the final 15,000 write-in ballots Sunday – but that most likely won’t be the end of the road for either Miller or Murkowski.
From Monday through Wednesday, absentee and questioned ballots will be opened and counted.
Later this week, a federal court is scheduled to hear a lawsuit Miller filed arguing that Murkowski’s name should be spelled completely correctly on the write-in ballots. Election officials have said in the past that they would judge the write-in ballots based on voter intent.
Nonetheless, Murkowski’s team appeared confident they were headed to victory. One of Murkowski’s lawyers for the counting proceedings, veteran recount attorney Ben Ginsberg, told the Anchorage Daily News that he was flying back Saturday, saying, “This is in good hands, and the outcome looks pretty obvious.”
Miller has 87,517 votes, but that total will increase slightly after additional absentee and questionable ballots are counted early this week.
At the end of Saturday's count, Murkowski had won 74,449 write-in votes outright.
No comments:
Post a Comment