Oh yes, considering what’s at stake, we’re are interested in the outcome.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The fate of a convicted felon will help determine the size of the Democrats’ expanded power in the U.S. Senate, and may provide a new job opportunity for failed vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.
After being found guilty of political corruption last month, Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, 84, of Alaska clung to a narrow lead on Thursday in his bid to win an eighth term.
With state election officials sorting through thousands of absentee ballots, a winner was not expected to be announced for at least several days.
If challenger Mark Begich pulls it out, it would increase to seven the number of Senate seats Democrats have gained from Tuesday’s national election, boosting their majority to 58 in the 100-member chamber.
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Say it ain’t so. If Stevens pulls this out and in turn is expelled from the Senate, there will be a special election.
Can you see the movie “Sarah goes to Washington.” ?!!?
Be still.
As the count continues, something smells and it isn’t rotted fish. Two + two does not make four. Questions are being raised:
So what really happened in the Alaska election?
– an Andrew Sullivan catch
Four years ago, 313,592 out of 474,740 registered voters in Alaska participated in the election-a 66% turnout. Taking into account 49,000 outstanding ballots, on Tuesday 272,633 out of 495,731 registered Alaskans showed up at the polls; a turnout of 54.9%.
That’s a decrease of more than 11% in voter turnout even though passions ran high for and against Obama, as well as for and against Sarah Palin! This year, early voters set a new record. As of last Thursday, with 4 days left for early voting, 15,000 Alaskans showed up-shattering the old record set in 2004 by 28%!
Consider the most popular governor in history-and now the most polarizing-was on the Republican ticket.
Consider the historic nature of this race; the first African American presidential candidate EVER! The second woman to ever make a presidential ticket; and she’s one of our own. Despite that, we’re supposed to believe that overall participation DECREASED by 11%.
Not only that, but this historic election both nationally and for Alaska HAD THE LOWEST ALASKA TURNOUT FOR A PRESIDENTIAL RACE EVER!!! That makes sense. REALLY??? Something stinks.
But wait, there’s more…
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AND
Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight examines the claim.
What In The Hell Happened in Alaska?
Although Ted Stevens holds a small lead in Alaska and is the favorite to retain his seat, the outcome is not as inevitable as it might appear to be. Stevens currently holds a lead of 3,353 votes, or about 1.5 percent of the votes tallied so far. But, there are quite a large number of ballots yet to count.
According to Roll Call, these include “at least 40,000 absentee ballot, 9,000 early voting ballots, and an undetermined number of questionable ballots”.
Indeed, it seems possible that the number of “questionable” ballots could be quite high. So far, about 220 thousand votes have been processed in Alaska. This compares with 313 thousand votes cast in 2004. After adding back in the roughly 50,000 absentee and early ballots that Roll Call accounts for, that would get us to 270 thousand ballots, or about a 14 percent drop from 2004. It seems unlikely that turnout would drop by 14 percent in Alaska given the presence of both a high-profile senate race and Sarah Palin at the top of the ticket.
But even if Begich were to make up ground and win a narrow victory, this would seem to represent a catastrophic failure of polling, as three polls conducted following the guilty verdict in Stevens’ corruption trial had Begich leading by margins of 7, 8 and 22 points, respectively.
The emerging conventional wisdom is that there was some sort of a Bradley Effect in this contest — voters told pollsters that they weren’t about to vote for that rascal Ted Stevens, when in fact they were perfectly happy to. Convicted felons are the new black, it would seem.
The problem with this theory is that the polling failures in Alaska weren’t unique to Stevens. They also applied to the presidential race, as well as Alaska’s at-large House seat. In each case, the Republican outperformed his pre-election polling by margins ranging from 12 to 14 point:
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There are three plausible explanations I can think of to explain this discrepancy…..
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The second possibility is that a substantial percentage of the Democratic vote is tied up in the early and absentee ballots that have yet to be counted. We know that Barack Obama overperformed among early voters in many states, and Alaska may be no exception. (Although, I would guess that the absentee vote is predominately rural, whereas Begich’s base is in Anchorage).
The third possibility is that a lot of those “questionable” ballots are Democratic ones, and that there have been irregularities in the voting tally. Although this is the least likely possibility, Alaska is a provincial state with some history of corruption, and Democrats ought to be making sure that too many of their ballots haven’t been disqualified.
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A Serious question indeed.
I’d be tempted to think we’ll be told by Sarah Palin’s appointees
a hungry Moose ate the ballots.
[UPDATE: Friday, November 7, 2008]
While the stats smells, Nate Silver is not ready to give Stevens the lead forever…Nate sees a glimmer in those early votes – all 9,500 to be counted….it’s looking good for Begich.
Uncounted Votes May Push Begich Past Stevens
Although Ted Stevens currently holds a lead of approximately 3,200 votes in ballots counted to date in Alaska’s senate contest, there is good reason to believe that the ballots yet to be counted — the vast majority of which are early and absentee ballots — will allow Mark Begich to mitigate his disadvantage with Stevens and quite possibly pull ahead of him.
The reasoning behind this is simple: some early ballots have been processed, and among those ballots Begich substantially leads Stevens. A tally of Alaska’s 40 house districts as taken from Alaska’s Division of Elections webpage suggests that Begich has won about 61% of the early ballots counted so far, as compared with 48% of ballots cast on Election Day itself.
More..read the whole article for tables and charts
