Another day, another lawsuit by Joe Miller challenging the vote count in the Alaska Senate race. The latest suit comes in state court and is similar to a claim Miller, a Republican and tea party favorite, filed before a federal judge last week, the Anchorage Daily News reported. The newspaper said Miller’s 21-page filing Monday [...]
After more than a week of ballot counting, Sen. Lisa Murkowski has been named the winner in Alaska, defeating tea party favorite Joe Miller and becoming the first Senate candidate in more than 50 years to win a write-in campaign. With only 700 votes left to count Wednesday afternoon, state election officials announced that Murkowski’s [...]
Christopher Miller for The New York Times Gail Fenumiai, right, director of the Alaska Department of Elections, examined a write-in ballot for Senator Lisa Murkowski with Sarah Felix, assistant attorney general of Alaska, in Juneau on Wednesday.
7:39 p.m. | Updated JUNEAU, Alaska – “Liza Makowski?”
“Challenge.”
So said Terry Campo, an observer working on behalf of Joe Miller, the Republican Senate candidate, as he hovered over a table where two election workers on Wednesday helped sift through more than 230,000 ballots cast in the Alaska Senate race. The question looming over the warehouse in this remote state capital: will Senator Lisa Murkowski become the first write-in candidate elected to the Senate since 1954?
Write-in votes have a clear lead over Mr. Miller, but the process of actually seeing whose name is on them did not begin until Wednesday. The count is expected to last until at least Friday – but a court fight could last much longer.
Christopher Miller for The New York Times A challenged write-in ballot in Juneau, Alaska.State election officials have said legal precedent allows them to accept variations in the spelling of Ms. Murkowski’s name as long as they can determine “voter intent.” They have not specified what variations they will accept, though on Wednesday election officials said they were essentially going by phonetics. The Miller campaign has filed a federal lawsuit arguing that state law requires write-in votes to be spelled correctly. On Wednesday, a federal judge court denied the campaign’s request to stop the count but the broader challenge remains.
A long fight still seemed possible after the first fraction of write-in ballots were tabulated on Wednesday. With 7 percent of precincts counted, state election officials had determined that Ms. Murkowski had won roughly 98 percent of the vote. But about 9 percent of those were under challenge by the Miller campaign, many on questions of spelling. If the Miller campaign continues challenging ballots at that rate, it could try to argue in court that discounting the challenged ballots would make him the winner.
While the prospects of that argument are unclear, the lawsuit looms and the count goes on.
“We’re proceeding,” said Gail Fenumiai, the state elections director.
For all the tension, there was also good humor.
Mr. Campo, a Washington lawyer flown out by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, confessed to having a complicated perspective.
“They called Friday night and I didn’t ask who they were sending me out for,” Mr. Campo, a veteran election lawyer in Republican races, said as he scanned ballots that passed before him. “You usually don’t have to deal with Republican versus Republican.”
But he said he met Mr. Miller on Tuesday night and was impressed. By Wednesday morning he was on the job.
“Lisa Murkoski?” Challenge. “Lisa Murckoski?” Challenge.
There were votes for Snoopy, too. And at least one for Sarah Palin, though for the House, not the Senate.
“Murkowski, Lisa?” There were lots of those – and lots of challenges.
Then something changed. A signal went out from lawyers for Mr. Miller: stop challenging that one. Candidates whose names are actually on the ballot are listed last name first, as in Miller, Joe.
“I’m going to go ahead and tell everybody to back off that, O.K.?” an observer for Mr. Miller asked one of the lawyers working for his campaign, John J. Tiemessen.
Mr. Tiemessen explained later, “We had a miscommunication on that.”
Mr. Campo got the message. When Ms. Fenumiai came to the table to pass judgment on the challenged ballots – she worked her way from table to table during the day, accompanied by state lawyers – Mr. Campo waved away the ballots he had initially challenged because they had the names reversed. Back into the pile for Ms. Murkowski they went.
In the initial count on Election Day, ballot scanners only registered whether a voter had filled in the oval beside a candidate’s name – or beside the write-in category.
After Election Day, write-in votes led by about 13,400 votes, a difference of almost 7 percentage points. The margin narrowed on Tuesday, after a large batch of absentee and other ballots were counted. The write-in category now leads Mr. Miller by about 11,400 votes, about 5 percentage points.
Ms. Murkowski has been favored to win after the write-in ballots are counted. Barring a landslide for Mr. Miller in absentee and questioned ballots that are still to be counted, he could potentially need more than 10 percent of the write-in votes to have either been cast for someone other than Ms. Murkowski or to have been cast for her improperly.
Mr. Tiemessen said observers for Mr. Miller have been challenging ballots at a rate of about 7 to 12 percent, depending on the precinct.
“We’ve seen Nurkowski, we’ve seen Frank and Nancy Murkwoski, Lisa’s parents,” he said. “We’ve seen every possible permutation and even ones we didn’t know were possible. Basically, if you take Lisa Murkowski’s name and make an anagram out of it, we’ve seen it.”
Mr. Campo, at the counting table, said otherwise.
“I’m impressed with how many people spelled it right and how good their handwriting is,” he said.
The Murkowski campaign largely expressed confidence and satisfaction with the process and said the vast majority of ballots challenged by the Miller campaign were for minor spelling or legibility issues they believed would not ultimately cause them to be discounted. They said many of the ballots challenged by observers for Mr. Miller were determined to be valid by Ms. Fenumiai, including those with the first and last name reversed.
But even they seemed unsure of the exact standard Ms. Fenumiai was applying in terms of spelling.
“It appears to me that there’s about a three-letter standard,” said John Tracy, a spokesman for the Murkowski campaign, assessing how inaccurate a spelling might be before the ballot is discounted.
But he largely praised Ms. Fenumiai. He noted that she had allowed a ballot that placed a “y” on the end of the candidate’s last name but disallowed one that started her last name with an “N.”
“She playing it very safe,” he said.
Sarah Felix, the state’s assistant attorney general, who consulted with Ms. Fenumiai as she reviewed ballots throughout the day, said there were not precise parameters on what spellings or other variations she would accept.
“The director is using her discretion,” Ms. Felix said. “She’s using a common sense phonetic test.”
While state election official cite case law they say allows discretion in things like spelling, state law says write-in votes will be counted if the write-in oval is filled in and “if the name, as it appears on the write-in declaration of candidacy, of the candidate or of the last name of the candidate is written in the space provided.”
In a brief filed Tuesday, Thomas Van Flein, a lawyer for Mr. Miller, wrote that “write-in ballots with misspellings are statutorily invalid, and election officials lack the authority to decide nevertheless to count them.”
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski appeared Wednesday to have an insurmountable lead after a week of counting write-in votes in the Alaska Senate race — but it’s not over. Republican Joe Miller, trailing Murkowski by 10,400 votes, says the state’s computerized voting system is “suspect” and that the returns from the Nov. 2 election should be counted [...]
Her recent poll numbers suggest a slump, but Sarah Palin definitely scored two home runs Monday. The debut of her new TV reality series, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” set a ratings record for TLC Sunday night, and a mash-up word she made famous, “refudiate,” was named “word of the year” by the New Oxford American Dictionary. [...]
JUNEAU, Alaska – The lawyers have started leaving.
That is perhaps the surest sign that Joe Miller’s chances of becoming the next senator from Alaska are evaporating. With each passing day that election workers here in the state capital manually count write-in votes cast for Senator Lisa Murkowski, it appears increasingly likely that Alaskans spell too well for Mr. Miller’s math to work.
Assisted by lawyers sent by the Republican National Senatorial Committee, the Miller campaign set out to challenge every smudge, stray mark and misspelling they could find (and, often, only they could find) on write-in votes that appeared to be for Ms. Murkowski.
The plan was to question enough votes to close the 11,000-vote margin by which he trails – and then to convince the courts that those challenged votes should be discounted.
Alaska law says write-in votes will be counted if the name or last name is written “as it appears” on the candidate’s declaration form. But state election officials, citing legal precedent in the state, said they would count all votes in which they could determine “voter intent,” misspellings aside.
Now the dispute could become irrelevant. After three days of counting, the state has determined that 98 percent of write-in ballots were cast for Ms. Murkowski – and 90 percent of those were cast so cleanly that they have survived even the sometimes bafflingly strict scrutiny applied by monitors working for Mr. Miller.
Even if every ballot his campaign has challenged was thrown out in court, which is not likely, Mr. Miller could gain less than 10,000 votes. Several thousand absentee ballots that remain to be counted could help him narrow the margin, but not likely enough for him to win. The write-in count is expected to last several more days.
“The numbers are all on our side,” said Kevin Sweeney, Ms. Murkowski’s campaign manager.
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.
Mr. Miller told ABC News on Thursday that, “if the numbers of the challenged ballots don’t add up, we aren’t going to sit back and continue to contest this.”
But he appears far from ready to give up at this point. While some lawyers paid for by the senatorial committee were leaving, Mr. Miller sent an email to potential supporters seeking donations to keep up the fight. In the letter he reiterated claims his campaign has made this week, from allegations of voter fraud to the withholding of public records by the state. He also said that Ms. Murkowski, by running as a write-in after she lost to Mr. Miller in the Republican primary in August, “single-handedly sentenced the state to a divisive and expensive election.”
“We need your help in this fight. We’re going up against state bureaucrats, the media and powerful insiders to keep Murkowski entrenched in D.C.,” the letter said. “Click here to donate $100, $75, $50, or $25 today to the Joe Miller for U.S. Senate Recount Fund.”
Sarah Palin, who endorsed Mr. Miller, has donated $5,000 to the fund through her political action committee. (A former aide to Ms. Palin and a former employee of her political action committee, Ivy Frye, has been working as an observer for Mr. Miller during the write-in count.)
The Miller campaign has brought in Floyd Brown, a controversial conservative activist who produced the Willie Horton attack ads against Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts in the 1988 presidential race. Two days in a row, Mr. Brown held press conferences in the same room in which the ballots were being counted.
On Friday he said the campaign had received 300 “legitimate” claims of voter fraud or intimation through a telephone hotline it set up the day before. He showed four affidavits he said documented potential voter fraud. At least three of them were from people who either work or volunteer for the Miller campaign. One has held fundraisers for Mr. Miller
“Joe Miller will be the next United States senator from the state of Alaska,” Mr. Brown said.
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
Twitter
Facebook