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Thousands of Alaskans are voting before Election Day. Some ballots won’t be counted until after it.
Ballot counting will continue until at least Nov. 18 and the state aims to certify the results by Nov. 25
By James Brooks
Alaska Beacon
Early, in-person voting opened for Alaska’s general election on Monday morning, and as of Wednesday morning, 17,560 Alaskans had already cast their votes.
That includes almost 11,000 people who have voted at early voting sites in the Railbelt, Juneau and Nome, as well as more than 6,000 who had voted absentee by mail, fax or in person. More than 30,000 blank absentee ballots have not yet been returned.
Ahead of the general election, campaigns are urging supporters to vote in advance, and Republicans appear to be taking the advice. More than one in four (26.6%) early votes cast on Monday and Tuesday were from registered Republicans, according to a report from the Alaska Division of Elections.
Registered Democrats made up 19% of early voters during the same period, fewer than one in five.
During early voting, which takes place in person at select locations, voters’ identity and eligibility are verified on-site, just as it is on Election Day.
With absentee voting, which can take place by mail, a voter’s eligibility and identity is verified after the ballot is submitted. That means absentee votes can be disqualified for technical reasons, such as if the ballot isn’t co-signed by a witness who verifies the voter’s identity, or if it reaches elections officials after a deadline in state law.
Nationally, advance voting — absentee and early voting combined — is happening at a record pace, but here in Alaska, it’s too early to tell whether the state will match that trend.
In other states, more ballots are cast before Election Day than on Election Day itself, but that’s only happened in an Alaska general election once, during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic emergency.
According to the division’s stated timeline, election night results will include ballots voted at polling places on Election Day and ballots voted at early voting locations from Oct. 19 through Oct. 29.
That means anything voted from Oct. 30 through Nov. 2 won’t be included in the election night total.
The cutoff is for security reasons — it lets the division double-check to make sure someone hasn’t voted both early and on Election Day.
There’s no set timeline for counting absentee ballots. A review board that checks the identities of absentee voters won’t begin working until Oct. 27.
The board, a multipartisan group of paid, temporary workers, will also look for disqualifying procedural flaws. Already, 81 absentee ballots have been rejected by elections officials. A full count of the reasons for rejection won’t be published until late November or early December.
Whatever ballots the review board manages to check by Election Day will be included in the Election Day total, but many absentee ballots — including some cast before Election Day — won’t be counted until after Election Day.
Under Alaska law, mailed absentee ballots will be counted if they arrive after Election Day, but only if they were postmarked on or before Election Day and arrive no later than 10 days after Election Day if mailed from within the United States or 15 days after Election Day if mailed from overseas.
That means election results could change significantly as more ballots are counted after Election Day.
In addition, results from Election Day through Nov. 18 will show only voters’ first choices. In Alaska, voters can rank up to four candidates and a write-in for an office.
If no candidate for an office has more than 50% of the first-choice votes, then a ranked choice tabulation is used to determine the winner.
Because of a policy set by the Alaska Division of Elections in 2022, Alaska doesn’t perform that tabulation until Nov. 18, the deadline for the last absentee ballots to arrive.
Some jurisdictions that use ranked choice voting, such as Portland, Oregon, do multiple tabulations. But others, including Maine and New York City, wait for days after Election Day to do their first tabulation.
• James Brooks Cascade is a longtime Alaska reporter who lives in Juneau. He previously worked at the Anchorage Daily News, Juneau Empire, Kodiak Mirror and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
