Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola lost in her legal effort to get access to records identifying rejected absentee ballots during the ongoing count, and then lost some of her narrow lead in the latest ballot drop Wednesday night.
An Alaska judge on Wednesday ruled against the Peltola campaign’s request for the records in the midterm’s final uncalled Senate race, ruling the demand was “simply not reasonable” while election officials continue counting votes.
Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews sided with the Alaska Division of Elections, finding the agency is “currently busy processing ballots from the 2026 general election” and “simply lacks the capacity to generate the report” from the voter registration database.
“Even if the request were otherwise considered reasonable outside the peak election time of year, it is simply not reasonable nor required right now,” Matthews wrote, adding that “the timing of the Campaign’s request could simply not be worse.”
Peltola’s campaign had sued last week seeking information about which absentee ballots were flagged for rejection and why.
Campaign attorney Abha Kelly told the court the process was “going incredibly smoothly” and that the campaign was not seeking confidential data or trying to disrupt the count. She argued the request would simply centralize transparency that observers already have in a decentralized way.
DUNLEAVY CALLS ALASKA VOTING SYSTEM ‘VERY CONFUSING’ AS RAZOR-THIN SENATE RACE FROZEN IN TIME
State attorneys countered that the records are not public, citing voter privacy interests.
“Voters have a privacy interest in that because people who want to vote absentee presumably don’t want to mess it up and don’t want to be publicly exposed as having messed that up,” Assistant Attorney General Margaret Paton-Walsh said.
The state also said producing a customized report would impose a significant burden during peak election work.
Matthews added at the Tuesday hearing that the case was “not about who won or lost the election” but about access to public records under the Public Records Act. The Sullivan campaign was allowed to intervene.
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With roughly 86% of the expected vote counted and more than 248,000 ballots tallied, Peltola held 121,487 first-choice votes (48.9%) to incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan’s 117,512 (47.3%), a lead of 3,975 votes. Neither candidate is above 50%, so the race remains on track for ranked-choice tabulation after absentee counting concludes around Nov. 18, with certification expected Nov. 25.
The race could still come down to the other candidates, including Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., who has 4,100 votes, while Gerald Heikes has 5,426.
Those third- and fourth-place totals exceed the current margin between the top two candidates and could prove decisive when lower finishers are eliminated and second-choice preferences are redistributed under Alaska’s ranked-choice system. The vote to repeal that voting system is failing at 52.5%-47.5%, which is also still too close to call over a week after Election Day.
Fox News’ Melissa Chrise, Matt Finn, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
