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Alaskan Special Election Update: Petola's Lead Increases. [1]
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Date: 2022-08-27
The special election to fill the U.S. House seat in Alaska is not over yet, but Democrat Mary Petola’s lead has increased with the latest batch of mail in ballots.
The Alaska Division of Elections tallied votes on Friday in the state’s August election, but results in the special U.S. House race won’t be final for days. With a new ballot count released Friday evening, more than 190,000 votes have been cast and turnout has exceeded 32% — the highest August election turnout in Alaska since 2014, when turnout was 39%. Results won’t be official until they are reviewed and certified by the state board of elections early next month. In the special U.S. House race, which marked the state’s first ranked choice election under a new voting system, Democrat Mary Peltola grew her lead and has 39.6% of the first-choice votes counted so far. Peltola is almost nine points ahead of Republican Sarah Palin, who has 30.9% of first-choice votes. Republican Nick Begich III trails with 27.8%. Write-in candidates have 1.6%. The winner of the race will be determined by second-choice votes, which won’t be tallied until Aug. 31, the deadline for election officials to receive overseas ballots in the special election.
This rank choice is still confusing for me, but I think that the results in the main pic are after at least one round of the rank choice process. There were a ton of people running for this seat, and none of them are in that table. You can see the rest for yourselves in the the article. I do know that if a voter did not pick a second choice on their ballot, then those votes are eliminated during the first round.
The final rounds will not be done until August 31st.
Where this gets interesting is who did Begich’s voters pick for their second rank choice? Begich is no fan of Sarah Palin. In fact, he ran ads against her as only being interested in celebrity and not politics. And she did quit during her first term as governor of Alaska to cash in on her celebrity among the TEA Party and later MAGA crowd. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Begich’s voters might not like Palin all that much.
If my math is correct, I think that Petola has to pick up approximately 45% of Begich’s voters to reach the 51% of votes needed to be declared the victor. Is that doable? Maybe.
Then again, Begich’s voters may go tribal and say, “Better a Republican than a Democrat.”
I’m hoping that Petola does reach 51%. Not only would she be a far, far, far better Congresswoman for Alaska than the wretched Palin, it would be a huge moral booster for Democrats. I have no idea if Petola could survive this fall’s election, but just having another Democrat from a red state in the win column would be another blow against the Media narrative that Democrats are going to lose the House this fall.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/27/2119229/-Alaskan-Special-Election-Update-Petola-s-Lead-Increases
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