I’ve been hearing this rumor all day long. It’s not true:
So about those rumors that votes were counted today? The elections director wants people to quit it. #akgov #aksen pic.twitter.com/9qhEtVOrMG
— Alexandra Gutierrez (@alexgutierrez) November 8, 2014
More from APRN’s Gutierrez, who’s been faithfully crunching the numbers. (See the spreadsheet she’s using for the governor’s race here and the Senate race here.)
Assuming 3rd party/write-ins take 5% of the uncounted votes, Begich needs a 57-38 margin and Parnell needs a 51-44 break. #aksen #akgov
— Alexandra Gutierrez (@alexgutierrez) November 8, 2014
Ah,
Was the error regarding the PFD payments human and not software related? That would be important to note. I would not attempt to link PFD eligibility with voting for two reasons. First, children are included in the listings as well as many name changes and residency changes occur. Second, if a citizen doesn’t want to be informed of the issues, I see no reason to encourage them to vote.
Under the guise of “trust but verify” ; I would like to see voters allowed to request a two-part ballot with a serial number that is not linked to their name yet allows them to a retain a tamper resistant copy so they can later check the data base to see if that ballot was scanned as marked.
Lynn, I tend to agree but with a small caution… The State bollixed the electronic PFD payments pretty badly for a bunch of people a year ago. In the case of a PFD payment it’s generally repairable where in the case of an election there are no ‘Do Overs’. I does seem like a reasonable expectation though. At the very least, the State ought to have counted every vote not later than 48 hours after the election and if that means that absentee votes need to be received by the state not later than COB on Election Day then so be it.
This brings up an interesting thought, How about we link the Voter Rolls to the PFD Application data? We can then use the Voter Rolls to verify PFD eligibility. Failing to vote in at least one general election in the last 24 months would disqualify a PFD applicant for the upcoming PFD. This would not limit voters because the eligibility criteria for PFD’s is far stricter than those used to qualify to vote.
It would provide a hell of an incentive to get out there and vote and might even improve our abysmal voter turnout record.
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Concerned,
Thank you for your comment. I would think that a state who can allow individuals to apply electronically for a PFD Check would be able to master the intricacies and security of voter data transmission so that almost no questions would need to be asked.
Yes, every vote counts. Let’s make sure they are all counted properly. The Alaska Division of Elections has an important role here. I agree, more communication about the process would be appreciated. We aren’t just awaiting the outcome regarding who our next Governor will be, but also whether the ACP & ALP will each get the 3% we each need for ballot access.
Begich people are assuming that the votes remaining will tend there way because early voters will be younger and because, well, it happened last time.
I believe that logic is flawed. Look no further than the Lisa-Miller election; it was fairly close but the late count didn’t really change anything and mirrored the regular election day count.
The ramifications of this elections for Governor and Senator are huge. People need to have faith that the division of elections is above reproach. I have no reason to believe that they aren’t – but it would really help them if they spent some time publicly outlining the process, the timeline and answering questions. The information they provide can be confusing and cause concern without any explanations. For example – they indicated that after reviewing question ballots they had more than 13, 890 to review,, they also have stated that more early ballots arrived from rural Alaska AFTER election day , at that same time that they indicated that some districts don’t have all of their ballots in – 3 days after the election. That is alarming – again – without an explanation. Finally, they have received more than 1,000 ballots via fax- it would certainly help to calm people’s fears if they knew what the “chain of custody” was in all of these situations – and if counters were making an effort to see if there were any instances of multiple ballots coming from a single fax machine. A little communication goes a long way.