Peltola Holds Narrow Lead but Loses Court Bid for Rejected Absentee Ballot Data

An Alaska judge rejected Democrat Senate candidate Mary Peltola’s bid for records on rejected absentee ballots.

Peltola currently holds a slim lead over Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan in the last uncalled Senate race. As of Thursday, she had 121,487 votes to Sullivan’s 117,512, a lead of 1.6 percentage points, according to the Associated Press.

The Democrat’s campaign sued last Friday for a list of voters whose absentee ballots were tossed, as well as an explanation for the rejections. Alaska Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews on Wednesday sided with the state’s Division of Elections, stating, “The timing of the Campaign’s request could simply not be worse,” Fox News reported,

Matthews called the campaign’s request “simply not reasonable,” writing that 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.

The Justice Department is investigating allegations that Democrats helped recruit independent candidate Dan J. Sullivan to run as a conspiracy to deceive voters. The New York Times first reported that Peltola campaign aides actively recruited Dan J. Sullivan, also known as “Decoy Dan,” to funnel votes away from his namesake.

As of Thursday, Dan J. Sullivan had 4,100 votes, and Republican Gerald L. Heikes had 5,426 votes.

Defending the campaign’s request for absentee ballot records, Peltola campaign attorney Abha Khanna argued that the campaign wasn’t seeking confidential information. The state’s assistant attorney general countered that voters have privacy rights.

“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.

Friday is the deadline for domestic mail ballots to arrive and be counted under Alaska law; ballots from overseas voters can arrive through Nov. 18. That is also the planned date for the state to begin ranked-choice tabulations if no candidate has topped 50%.

Under Alaska’s ranked-choice system, if no candidate wins a majority, the last-place candidate is eliminated and those ballots go to each voter’s next choice in the race. That process repeats until two candidates remain.

Sullivan’s campaign has argued that he has a path to victory in later rounds of voting, because neither of the top two finishers has a majority. Peltola held 48.9% of the vote as of Thursday, according to The Associated Press.

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