A reader poll at Must Read Alaska reveals that 97% of over 600 participants believe the Alaska Division of Elections should release the raw data from the Nov. 5 election, rather than sit on that data and not release it until after the ranked-choice calculation is completed by the computers later this month.
Due to Alaska’s complicated voting system, some races in Alaska cannot be called because the computers at the State election office must perform the extra step of reassigning second- and third-choice votes. The entire nation is now waiting on Alaska to complete the congressional race, for example, since neither candidate Nick Begich nor incumbent Mary Peltola reached the 50% + 1 vote threshold to win.
But the Division of Elections has the existing, already counted second- and third-place votes in hand and those data files are being kept secret from the campaigns and the public.
Must Read Alaska has filed a public records request with the division to release the data that it has, since this is public information and there is no legal reason to not provide it.
The first time ranked-choice voting was used in Alaska — in November of 2022 — the data was not released until after the division had already run the calculation, which gave Peltola the win over Sarah Palin. After that, the Election Division posted the raw data on its website and data analysts were able to see what occurred in the election.
As Alaska’s elections are run now, the public won’t know who won that seat until Nov. 20 — 15 days after the election ends. There is no law requiring that secrecy. If the data was released earlier, the campaigns could analyze it and understand whether or not there is truly a path forward for them.
The current standing in the Begich-Peltola race is that Begich is ahead with 125,222 votes, and Peltola has 115,089 votes. Third-party candidate John Wayne Howe has 9,880, and Democrat Eric Hafner has 2,492. Begich has a vote lead of over 10,000 votes; there are believed to be about 45,000 more votes to be counted before the Division will, after Nov. 15, run its calculation to determine where the straggler ranking votes are assigned.
