Alaska voters will apparently have to wait a while longer to find out who won the closely watched race for the state’s lone House of Representatives seat, currently held by Democrat Mary Peltola.
None of the four candidates on the general election ballot received a majority of first-place votes in Alaska’s ranked voting system on Tuesday, meaning a new tabulation will be needed to determine a winner.
On Wednesday, Republican Nick Begich led with 49.8% of the vote, followed by Peltola with 45.5%.
Results from a second tabulation, and any other results, would be released on Nov. 20, according to the Alaska Division of Elections.
In August, during the primaries, Peltola had the largest share of votes with 50.9 votes%. But it is unclear whether she will get enough votes from supporters of other candidates who drop the ballot in each round of tabulations. That happened in 2022, when she defeated former Governor Sarah Palin for the seat.
Under Alaska’s ranked voting system, used by only one other state in Maine, voters rank their choices in a field of candidates rather than choosing just one candidate to vote for. If no one receives a majority of first-place votes, the second round of tabulation begins, with the first-place votes of the lowest-ranked candidate being discarded and those voters’ second-place choices distributed among the remaining candidates. This process continues until a candidate receives a majority.
The 2024 race was a rematch of sorts between Peltola and Nick Begich, whose grandfather of the same name posthumously won election to the House of Representatives in 1972 when his plane disappeared but his name could not be taken off the ballot. An uncle of Begich’s, Mark, was also an Alaska senator. In 2022, enough Begich supporters chose Peltola over Palin with their second-choice votes to give Peltola the House seat.
But Republicans had hoped for a different scenario this time. After the primaries, the third and fourth place candidates were eliminated, causing the fifth and sixth place candidates to move up to the last four names on the ballot. One of them, Eric Hafner, is in a New York jail, and Democrats accused him of maneuvering onto the ballot as the second Democrat to help swing the election to Begich.
Peltola made history as the first Alaskan elected to represent the state in the House of Representatives. Peltola is Yup’ik, and Alaska has the highest proportion of Native residents of any state, at about 20.4%. Peltola’s seat was held by Rep. Don Young, a Republican, for 49 years until his death in 2022. While Peltola has tried to carve a niche as a moderate, House Republicans focused on that early in the 2024 cycle and the Cook Political Report called the race a toss-up.
View the full results of the Alaska House elections here.
