Republican Joe Miller is still confident about his lead in uncontested write-in ballots in the Alaska Senate race against Sen. Lisa Murkowski, despite Murkowski’s steady gains since the count started five days ago. “If current trends hold, Miller and Murkowski will likely end up in a dead heat in the uncontested ballot count,” the Miller campaign said in a press release.
But even if his lead among the uncontested ballots gives Miller hope, the departure of half of his legal team from Juneau over the weekend could be a sign that the Miller team thinks a lawsuit over contested ballots will be unnecessary, and that Murkowski will win outright with uncontested ballots.
Murkowski launched a write-in campaign after losing the Republican primary to Miller. The total number of write-in votes led Miller 41%-34% in the general election, which forced a count of the ballots to see how many were for Murkowski.
The Anchorage Daily News reports that as of last night:
[Murkowski] trailed Miller by 8,820 votes, according to her undisputed tally..More than 98,500 write-in ballots were cast, with election officials set to count the last big batch of absentee ballots, an estimated 8,600 to 8,800, this week; a few hundred outstanding ballots from overseas and military addresses are expected by Wednesday’s deadline for those.
As of Sunday, Miller had 87,517 votes, Murkowski had 78,697 that were undisputed.
There are an additional 7,059 write-in votes that the Miller campaign has disputed, which so far the state is counting as Murkowski votes. But since the counting began, the number of votes for Murkowski that were not disputed by the Miller campaign has held steady at 89%.
[TPM SLIDESHOW: Stranger Than Fiction? TPM Casts The 2010 Midterms Movie]
If Mukowski wins outright with undisputed votes, Miller has said he won’t challenge the win. But he has already filed two lawsuits over the count, one in state court for information related to possible voter fraud, and one in federal court over whether or not the state should count misspelled write-in ballots as votes for Murkowski.
But as the New York Times reported on Saturday:
Ben Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who worked on the Florida recount in the 2000 presidential campaign and was brought to Juneau to work for Ms. Murkowski, flew out on Friday night. At least three of the seven lawyers that the National Republican Senatorial Committee hired to help Mr. Miller will have left by Saturday.
Miller is confident that he’s not out of the game yet — in a press release sent out last night, campaign spokesman Randy DeSoto was confident that Miller can pick up some votes from the absentee ballot count this week. “If previous trends hold for the absentee ballot count, it is possible for Joe to gain as many as 1,000 votes against Lisa Murkowski tomorrow,” said DeSoto.
Jillian Rayfield
Jillian Rayfield is a Reporter/Blogger for TPM, and started as a News Intern in May 2009. She graduated from Cornell University in May 2008 with a degree in Film, and worked as a Research Assistant for a market research firm in London in between.
Facebook Conversations
Questions about commenting with non-Facebook accounts like Yahoo, or other concerns? Click here to read the TPM Commenting FAQ.