AK-Sen: Gap Closes to 971 Votes

Great news:

It’s just getting started, but early results from this afternoon’s ballot counting in the contest for U.S. Senate show Mark Begich gaining ground against incumbent Sen. Ted Stevens.

The elections division still has tens of thousands of ballots left to count today and even more next week, but the latest numbers show Stevens’ lead is down to 971 votes.

The new numbers, reflecting nearly 28,000 newly counted absentee ballots, are from all over the state. Election night, Stevens led the Democratic Begich by about 3,000 votes.

Before this latest batch of counted ballots, Stevens has leading by 3257 votes, so this is some excellent movement.

Altogether, the state is counting 60,000 absentee or questioned ballots today — so there’s a lot of room left for Begich to grow his vote count. On top of that, there are an additional 35,000 votes that the Alaska Department of Elections will be counting over the next week. More updates as we get ’em…

Update: For up-to-the-minute results, check here.

Update II: Friend of SSP Nate Silver says that the outstanding districts that won’t post finalized counts today are Begich-friendly rural areas. (Indeed, if you take a look at the map, Begich did quite well in most of the state’s rural areas.)

Update III: Begich takes the lead — by a margin of three votes!

43 thoughts on “AK-Sen: Gap Closes to 971 Votes”

  1. None of the provisional ballots will be counted on Wednesday so presumably a tie would look real promising.

  2. Really? This is almost Minnesota Franken v. Coleman close! I guess the drama isn’t over yet in Alaska. I hope Begich can pull this off in the next few days! ‘Cuz hey, do any of us even want to think about “Senator Sarah Palin”??!!

  3. This is stunningly good news.  As I understand it, there were about 95,000 uncounted votes and these changes represent the counting of about 28,000 of those.  At this rate (hope, hope), Begich would win by more than 6,000 votes.  Berkowitz, however, would still fall way short.

  4. Do Democrats usually perform better in rural Alaskan than the moe urban areas?  If so would it have something to do with high numbers of indigenous peoples’ living in rural areas of the state?

  5. Aren’t the AIP voters mostly black helicopter types who would otherwise vote republican?  If so they could be the spoiler here in taking over 4% of the vote.

  6. With about 40,000 more votes now counted Begich’s up by 3.  250,000 votes counted so far.  Young’s lead is holding at 15,000 (data from CNN).

    Looks like Alaskans chose to vote against the for sure thief but not against someone who is suspicious and surly to boot.

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