An Alaska judge has shut the door on the Peltola campaign's effort to learn whose absentee ballots have been thrown out in America's only uncalled Senate race. Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews ruled on Wednesday that Democratic candidate Mary Peltola's campaign will not get the list of absentee voters whose ballots have been rejected, calling the request “not reasonable” while election officials are still counting. In his written ruling, Matthews held that the records the campaign wants “cannot reasonably be produced at this juncture, nor redacted of confidential information.”
The judge's reasoning was the calendar. The Division of Elections, he wrote, is in the middle of counting ballots, faces deadlines it must meet, and says its staff is working long hours at the agency's “fundamental responsibility — administering elections.” “The timing of the Campaign's request could simply not be worse,” Matthews wrote. He accepted that “in theory” records from the voter database could be redacted and produced in a way that would allow their release — but not now, and not in the form the campaign asked for. The division's detailed review reports are temporary working documents, not public records ripe for disclosure, and they carry confidential information: even the versions shown to campaign observers at the review boards include voters' home addresses, which observers may look at only under confidentiality agreements and may not keep, copy or record. Producing a tailored list from the division's “old, inflexible” voter database would require outside vendor work, and under state law that kind of “electronic service or product” cannot take priority over the agency's main responsibilities.
The campaign, which sued state elections officials last week, said its intent was to ensure that all qualified voters have their ballots counted. By Tuesday's hearing it had narrowed what it was asking for to a list of voters' names and their corresponding accept-or-reject codes — a point Matthews himself acknowledged at the end of the hearing: “I see this as a bit narrower than what I thought it was when I walked in here today.” Its attorney, Abha Khanna, told the judge the campaign was not trying to disrupt the count — “as far as we can tell, the absentee ballot review process is going incredibly smoothly and we plan to keep it that way” — and argued the information is a matter of public record, in line with what campaign observers can already see where the review boards meet. The state answered on privacy and on sequence: state law sets its own timelines for notifying voters of a rejection, ballot status is not posted until at least 10 days after certification, and it makes no sense for a campaign to learn of a rejection before the voter does. Sen. Dan Sullivan's campaign backed the state, asking only that if any records were produced, they be made “equally and simultaneously available to all candidates in the affected race.”
Neither the law firm representing Peltola's campaign nor the state Department of Law immediately answered requests for comment on Wednesday, and no appeal has been announced. The count itself goes on without the list. The latest tally is unchanged: Peltola 118,926 to Sullivan 114,676 — a lead of 4,250 votes, about 49 percent to 47 percent, with 245,470 ballots counted and the Associated Press estimating about 84 percent of the vote in. The next results release is expected Friday. Ballots mailed from overseas can still arrive until November 18, which is also the day the Division of Elections targets for the ranked-choice tabulation — a step Peltola, still short of 50 percent of first-choice votes, needs those second choices to survive. Certification is targeted for November 25.
For ordinary Alaska voters, the ruling settles a practical question: if your absentee ballot is one of the nearly 2,000 rejected so far — more than half of them questioned ballots — no campaign will be told your name, and no campaign will be coming to your door about it. That matters because Alaska gives a voter no way to fix a rejected ballot: forget to sign the envelope and the vote simply does not count, and under the state's own schedule you may not learn it was rejected until after the results are certified. The other side of the ruling is privacy — every absentee voter's home address stays out of campaign hands in the middle of a count. In a race being held by 4,250 votes, a rejected pile of nearly 2,000 ballots is large enough to matter; after Wednesday's ruling, it will stay anonymous as well.
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