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While elections across America were decided fairly quickly Tuesday night, the country is probably going to have to wait weeks to learn the outcome of one of the most hotly contested and controversial U.S. Senate races: Alaska.
That’s because of some idiosyncrasies in the state aptly known as the Last Frontier. Alaska is the biggest state and one of the most remote. Its roughly 600,000 registered voters are spread out across an area twice the size of Texas, with many areas accessible only by plane or boat. The state builds in a long grace period after Election Day for ballots to make their way to election offices.
John Lindback, a former elections official who oversaw the processes in Oregon and Alaska, said Alaska is “a very, very difficult place to conduct elections” and needs extra time to ensure all votes from remote areas are counted.
“If you’re a control freak, the director of the division of elections job in Alaska is not for you because the place is so huge,” he said. “They have their own schedule for counting, and they don’t deviate from that, and they don’t make apologies for it.”
Alaska stands out because it is one of two states in the nation (along with Maine) to use ranked choice voting to regularly choose congressional representatives.
The origins of the ranked choice voting stretch back to the 1800s in Europe, when Denmark embraced it as a way to choose leaders. The first place in America to use it was Ashtabula, Ohio, in a 1915 election to select city council members, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Data and Science Lab.
Hawaii uses it for special federal and county elections, according to the MIT lab. Three counties and 36 cities also use it.
In some states, if no candidate wins a majority of votes on election night, there must be a subsequent runoff election. With ranked choice voting, the idea is that the runoff happens within the same election because voters have already ranked the candidates by preference. Advocates say it allows for better representation and an outcome that most closely resembles what people want. Critics say it is confusing to voters.
Voters in Maine narrowly approved the switch to ranked choice voting in 2016, with 52% support, and the state became the first to use the system in statewide races in 2018. In 2020, Alaska voters also narrowly approved the shift, with 50.6% of the vote, and started using it in 2022. (An effort to repeal ranked choice voting in Alaska fell just 743 votes short in 2024. This year, another measure to repeal the system is too close to call, but those in favor of keeping it in place held a narrow lead as of Wednesday.)
Alaska allows voters to rank candidates by preference. If no candidate gets more than 50% of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and their votes are redistributed based on the voters’ second choices. The process continues until one candidate gets a majority.
The state’s primary system selects the top four vote-getters for the general election, regardless of political affiliation. That means there were four U.S. Senate candidates on the November ballot: incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, Democratic challenger and former congresswoman Mary Peltola, retired schoolteacher Daniel J. Sullivan, and Republican Gerald Heikes, a drywall contractor who has unsuccessfully run for office several times.
This race catapulted into the spotlight in the waning days of the campaign after The New York Times linked Peltola aides to an effort to recruit the retired schoolteacher to join the race in hopes of fracturing the Republican vote by putting another candidate on the ballot with the same name as the incumbent. Peltola has denied involvement in the effort, which has triggered state and federal investigations. There are only a small number of scenarios under which the second Dan Sullivan’s presence on the ballot would make a difference in the outcome.
The race appeared on Wednesday to be heading for ranked choice tabulation. Peltola held a narrow lead over the incumbent senator, but had less than 50% of the vote. Heikes had more than 4,800 votes — about 2% of the total. And the second Sullivan was in last place with 3,500 votes, about 1.6% of the total.
If Heikes voters ranked the incumbent senator as their second choice, it could be enough to secure Sullivan a third Senate term.
Alaska’s vast geography also complicates the timeline for counting votes. The state allows certain absentee ballots to arrive up to 10 days after Election Day, creating a lag in declaring winners. If needed, Alaska officials say they will start using the ranked choice process on Nov. 18, more than two weeks after Election Day.
Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.
