What to expect from the long delay in ranked-choice voting results after Nov. 5

Ranked-choice voting makes the election season longer in Alaska. Final results won’t be known until Nov. 20 — fully 15 days after the final ballots are cast on Nov. 5.

That’s because the Division of Elections cannot run the calculation for where second and third-place ballot choices will go until all the ballots are in from overseas and they know who is really in second place on the ranked-choice ballot.

In normal elections, voters have a good sense of what the results are, even if the overseas ballots are delayed. It’s known if there are enough outstanding ballots to make a difference in the Election Night results.

But with ranked-choice voting, some races will be “sit-and-wait.”

In 2022, when Mary Peltola was elected to the U.S. House, there was no clear winner for weeks. That meant that Peltola ended up with the least amount of seniority of the incoming House freshmen class. And in the meantime, Sarah Palin attended freshman orientation and announced she had hired her chief of staff, so sure was she that she would prevail. She did not.

There’s always a possibility that those in races with more than one candidate will reach the magic 50%+1 votes needed to be declared a winner. That happened in 2022 to Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who didn’t have to wait for ranked-choice calculations because he was the outright 50+1 winner (he won with 50.19% of the final vote.)

But even in the presidential race, the winner in the national level will be declared long before Alaska’s ranked-choice votes are counted. That is, unless Alaska’s three electoral votes are the ones that actually determine if the winning candidate has 270 electoral votes. In that case, Alaska will hold up the entire nation for more than two weeks because of ranked-choice voting.

If a close election happens, on Nov. 8 — three days after the election — with 99% of the ballots in, the Division of Elections can, if it chooses to, process everything in hand and determine if a candidate prevails without any of the handful of overseas votes.

Election Day counting may include ballots voted on Oct. 30, and 31, depending on how busy the Division of Elections is.

In this election, Alaska conservatives are up over 11,600 more Republican leaning voters having voted than Democrat-leaning voters. That’s an important measure because in the past, conservative voters have waited until Election Day to vote. This year, there is a push to bank their votes early and avoid the risk of not being able to vote on Election Day.

So far, there have been 56,000 absentee-in-person and early votes cast in Alaska.