Attorneys for Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) faced off in state court today against the legal team of Republican nominee Joe Miller, in Miller’s attempts to defeat Murkowski’s write-in campaign. No ruling will come immediately today, but is expected to come by Friday.
As KTUU, the local NBC affiliate in Anchorage, reports:
Miller argues that write-in votes must name “Lisa Murkowski,” exactly as her name appears on her declaration of candidacy, to be counted.
Murkowski’s lawyers, who have intervened in the lawsuit, turned to a dictionary for their argument and say the word “appears” means “seems to be” and therefore allows elections officials to assume voter intent.
The state’s attorney, Joanne Grace, agreed and says Miller’s “standard of perfection” clearly disenfranchises voters.
This stems from the state’s decision to allow for some lenience in the counting of write-in votes, with some misspellings allowed if the voter approximated the name “Lisa Murkowski.” But as we shall see, Murkowski’s voters scored a solid A-minus in spelling — enough of them did so exactly, such that she could scrape to a win even if Miller won on this issue alone.
Miller’s attorneys were also making a separate argument, as well, alleging that some registered sex offenders were able to illegally vote in the election. This would go beyond the issue of the write-in votes, and go deeper into disputing the validity of the election itself. Furthermore, it is an error without a remedy — because of the secret ballot, people can’t know whether a felon who illegally voted picked Murkowski, Democratic nominee Scott McAdams, or Miller himself, or perhaps even none of the above.
Miller won the Republican primary in August in a stunning 51%-49% upset, aided by the support of Tea Party activists and former Gov. Sarah Palin. However, Murkowski rebounded with a write-in campaign, which seems to have overcome all the obstacles that such an effort would face.
Write-in votes for Murkowski, counting those that were challenged by Miller’s campaign but nevertheless accepted by the state, give her a lead of over 10,000 votes. Even after subtracting every single write-in ballot that Team Miller has challenged — and keep in mind that in these sorts of matters, most challenges are ultimately rejected — Murkowski still leads by over 2,000. Murkowski is also arguing in court that that over 2,000 more ballots should be counted for her, where the state agreed with Team Miller on not counting a ballot, and it’s conceivable that the same logic might apply to not count many of those votes, either.
Miller is also calling for a statewide recount, on the basis that the initial machine-scans might have neglected some votes for him that weren’t picked up, compared to Murkowski’s votes being counted by hand.
Miller’s legal maneuvers against Murkowski have created the possibility that neither could be seated by early January, when Murkowski’s term expires, resulting in Alaska having only one senator in the interim. (A similar predicament happened in the ultra-close 2008 Minnesota Senate race, resulting in the state going six months without a second senator.) Miller has countered that the state would not be damaged — and that the state and the country would only be harmed if the second senator is Murkowski.
Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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