The initial results of Alaska’s unofficial election night results are up with many more ballots yet to count. The margins are expected to change over the next 15 days as tens of thousands of absentee and early ballots are tallied and added to the final results.
With nearly 96% of prisincts counted Gov. Mike Dunleavy is comfortably ahead; U.S. Senate candidate Kelly Tshibaka holds a slight lead over Sen. Lisa Murkowski, and U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola has 47% of the vote in the U.S. House race. The effort to call a statewide constitutional convention is failing 30.16% to 69.84%, and all 29 judges on the ballot are headed for retention.
The state sent out nearly 55,000 absentee ballots with roughly 36,000 returned as of Nov. 7. None of those are included in the election night totals. Additionally, another 19,000 outstanding absentee ballots have until Nov. 23 to be returned by voters, so long as they were postmarked by Nov. 8.
The state had also received nearly 35,000 early ballots. Those cast on or before Nov. 3, are included in the election night totals. All others will be tallied over the next two weeks.
Given the fact that so many absentee ballots will be counted after election night, a number of races state legislative races will likely see changes, as happened in 2020 when several candidates who were ahead on election night wound up losing in the end.
Adding to the uncertainty is the fact that Alaska is now using ranked choice voting for the first time in a general election. Contests in which a candidate wins more than 50% of the vote won’t proceed to second or third round runoffs. All other races, however, in which no candidate earns more than 50% of the vote, will employ the ranked-voting scheme. The results of those races won’t be known until Nov. 23.
With all these caveats in mind, here are the unofficial results as of Nov. 9.
Click the image above to view the latest results from all statewide and local legislative contests.
