In close races this Election Day, it will likely be weeks before Alaska knows the results

Alaska’s election results will take some time to come in following Election Day. 

Though officials will begin releasing first-round results starting shortly after the polls close at 8 p.m. Tuesday, in close races, there’s only so much Alaskans will know on election night. In any race where no candidate gets 50% of the vote, any victory celebrations will have to wait until at least Nov. 20.

That’s partly due to the state’s long window for absentee ballots to arrive after Election Day. Though they have to be postmarked by Election Day, mail ballots can arrive up to 10 days after Election Day from within the U.S., or up to 15 days for those mailed from outside the U.S., said Brian Jackson, the election program manager for the Alaska Division of Elections. That’s one reason tallies that are reported election night will only include a portion of the ballots cast in the election.

“We’ll count Election Day votes on Election Day, of course. [Also] included in the election night tallies will be the early voting ballots voted through Halloween, … as well as some absentee ballots,” Jackson said.

The exact cutoff for absentee ballots to be counted on Election Day varies by region, Jackson said. It depends on how busy the regional elections office is. But in any case — there will be a significant number of votes that have not been counted.

Those can add up to a significant fraction of the overall total. In 2022, some 60,000 votes were counted after the final report on election night. That’s almost a quarter — 22.7% — of all votes cast in that election. 

And while those who are ahead on election night often maintain their lead once all ballots are counted, that’s not always the case.

Looking again at 2022: at 1 a.m. the morning after Election Day, Kelly Tshibaka had a roughly 3,000-vote lead in first-place votes. By the time all the votes were counted two weeks later, Lisa Murkowski had pulled ahead by some 2,000 first-place votes.

(In that race, it didn’t really matter who was in first place.They both made it to the final round of ranked choice tabulation, where Murkowski wound up winning. But it goes to show: votes counted after Election Day can make a significant difference.)

So, for that matter, can the order in which voters rank their choices. All that’s reported on Election Day — and the seven- and 10-day counts after Election Day — are first-choice votes. 

If it’s close between the second and third place candidates, or the third and fourth place, a small number of votes can make a difference. So, Jackson said, election officials run the ranked choice tabulation on one day, Nov. 20, to “include as many countable ballots in it as possible.”

There’s not much the Division of Elections can do to speed up the process, Jackson said. The division could tabulate the ranked choice votes more frequently with a change in state regulation, but ultimately, the deadlines for absentee ballots to arrive are set in state law.

“It would take legislation to change this to make it faster,” he said.

All of that said: voters should expect the first results “somewhere in the neighborhood” of 8:30 or 9:00 p.m., Jackson said. The Division of Elections anticipates publishing updated counts every 30 to 40 minutes thereafter, until about 11 p.m., when updates start to slow as officials wait for the state’s rural hand-count precincts to call in their votes, he said.

“Our goal is to try and report 100% of the precincts” on election night, Jackson said.

Jackson also emphasized that the state’s vote-counting process features a variety of safeguards against both technical errors and intentional malfeasance.

Voting machines are tested by a bipartisan board twice ahead of the election to ensure they function properly, he said. Absentee and early votes are counted in secure areas of regional elections offices. 

Some polling places in remote communities failed to open, or opened late, during the primary election in August, leaving hundreds unable to vote in that election. In 2022, some ballots didn’t arrive from rural Alaska precincts until after the general election had been certified.

Jackson said the division has plans in place to ensure that people across the state are able to vote if polling places or election workers are unavailable. He said the division “works very hard to check in with our workers ahead of Election Day.” 

At the same time, Jackson said, “things do happen.” Election workers may get sick or be otherwise unavailable. A building where voting was supposed to take place may be inaccessible.

“If something like that were to happen, we would try and reach out to a community partner, someone that we could get additional materials to, and get somebody in the community to kind of raise their hand and and do what they can to ensure that Alaskan voters are able to vote on Election Day in their community,” Jackson said. 

There have already been some missteps ahead of Election Day. The Anchorage Daily News reported that more than 90 voters at absentee-in-person voting locations in Dillingham, Aniak and King Salmon were given the wrong ballots during the early voting period, listing judges for the Fourth Judicial District rather than the correct Third Judicial District. Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher said the division would contact the voters and allow them to either cast new ballots or have their already-cast ballots counted with the exception of the incorrect judicial races.

After Election Day, the state has safeguards in place to ensure votes are counted accurately, Jackson said. The Division of Elections also details the checks on its process in a document posted on its website.

Boards that determine whether absentee and questioned ballot voters are qualified are bipartisan, Jackson said, and observers are allowed at every stage of the process. Jackson says no part of the process occurs behind closed doors.

“There can be many eyes watching the process, being a part of the process, et cetera,” Jackson said.

There’s also a post-election audit conducted by the State Review Board. Jackson said the body is typically made up of 10 to 12 members, featuring at least two members from each of the two major parties. During that process, Jackson said, officials hand-count a random precinct’s ballots from each state House district to make sure the machine’s count matches the human count. If it’s off by more than 1%, all ballots would be counted by hand. 

The process is meant to catch systematic counting errors in the tabulators used at most precincts, but a full hand-count has never been necessary since post-election audits began in 1998, Jackson said.

Though the final count is expected Nov. 20, the results are unofficial until the State Review Board certifies them. The target date for certification is Nov. 30.

Jackson said the board works on consensus: there’s “not really a collective vote at the end” to determine whether the review board should certify the election, he said.

“The board really works as a team,” he said. “Everybody trusts the work that everybody else is doing in the room. We share information with each other — issues that might come up — so everybody’s in the know, because they all sign off on each other’s work at the end, certifying the election.”

State law says the director of the Division of Elections “shall certify” the winners after the review board completes its work.

Alaska Public Media will have live state election coverage from 9 to 11 p.m. on Tuesday. That follows special live election coverage from NPR with all the highlights from around the country.