Nine days after Election Day, all of Alaska’s 403 polling stations have reported results.
On Thursday, the Alaska Division of Elections reported that a tally sheet from the village of Atqasuk, a village of about 280 people in the North Slope Borough, had reached state officials.
Statewide, an estimated 30,000-35,000 absentee, questioned and early votes remain to be counted. Atqasuk was the last precinct to report results from Election Day itself.
Carol Beecher, director of the Division of Elections, said workers also added scanned ballots from the town of Coffman Cove, in Southeast Alaska.
Altogether, the division added 37 ballots to the statewide count on Thursday.
Those new ballots didn’t change the leaders of any races. The closest statewide race remains Ballot Measure 2, the proposed repeal of the state’s open primary election and ranked choice general election. As of Thursday night, “yes” on repeal led by 2,425 votes out of 304,386 cast statewide.
Wednesday is expected to bring the final unofficial count and will be tabulation day for the handful of state races that will be decided by ranked choice voting.
Ballots from all 403 precincts must reach elections officials before Wednesday in order to be included in the tabulation. Two years ago, ballots from six rural villages failed to arrive on time and were not fully counted in the general election.
After Wednesday, elections workers will hand-count randomly selected precincts to check for errors in the machine count. The division expects to certify the results by the end of the month.
