The Alaska election drama isn't over yet, not by a long shot. While it's looking increasingly like our at-large Republican Rep. Nick Begich III (AK-At Large) will keep his seat, the Senate race is still far from decided and will almost certainly go into at least one more round of ranked-choice ballots. In the latest development, the Peltola campaign has lost a legal bid to obtain records identifying rejected absentee ballots, and another tranche of ballots tabulated on Wednesday evening has once more narrowed her lead over Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK).
Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola lost in her legal effort to get access to records identifying rejected absentee ballots during the ongoing count, and then lost some of her narrow lead in the latest ballot drop Wednesday night.
An Alaska judge on Wednesday ruled against the Peltola campaign’s request for the records in the midterm's final uncalled Senate race, ruling the demand was "simply not reasonable" while election officials continue counting votes.
Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews sided with the Alaska Division of Elections, finding the agency is "currently busy processing ballots from the 2026 general election" and "simply lacks the capacity to generate the report" from the voter registration database.
That's very likely an accurate assessment, as Alaska's ranked choice voting (RCV) is already complicating the process, added to the fact that some of the ballots in the 2026 midterm are being reported in from some of the most remote settlements on the North American continent. That can make things difficult at best, all the more so when a race is as tight as this.
Right now, the gap has narrowed again — slightly — with the Democrat Mary Peltola still holding a slight lead. That lead could evaporate in the ranked-choice count.
With roughly 86% of the expected vote counted and more than 248,000 ballots tallied, Peltola held 121,487 first-choice votes (48.9%) to incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan's 117,512 (47.3%), a lead of 3,975 votes. Neither candidate is above 50%, so the race remains on track for ranked-choice tabulation after absentee counting concludes around Nov. 18, with certification expected Nov. 25.
The race could still come down to the other candidates, including Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., who has 4,100 votes, while Gerald Heikes has 5,426.
Those third- and fourth-place totals exceed the current margin between the top two candidates and could prove decisive when lower finishers are eliminated and second-choice preferences are redistributed under Alaska’s ranked-choice system. The vote to repeal that voting system is failing at 52.5% to 47.5%, which is also still too close to call over a week after Election Day.
That's the key. The third-place candidate, Gerald Heikes, ran as a Republican, while the "Decoy Dan" Sullivan ran as an independent, but as we learned from The New York Times and reported right here at RedState, the extraneous Dan Sullivan may well have been recruited by the Peltola campaign, and there are now some indications that Heikes was likewise recruited. So, if Alaska voters who selected Heikes as their first choice overwhelmingly ranked Senator Sullivan second, that may be enough votes to erase Mary Peltola's lead.
But it's an uphill climb, and as the counts are tabulated, the first candidate to break 50 percent wins, and Mary Peltola is closer to that than Sen. Sullivan is. Cross your fingers.
The next round of ranked-choice tabulation is set for November 18. That may well be what decides things. Oh, and it looks like our attempt to repeal RCV has failed once again; Alaska Republicans are going to have to learn to work with this system, and right the heck now.
Stay tuned. It ain't over until it's over.