Peltola loses court bid over rejected ballots in Alaska but still narrowly leads Senate race

Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola has lost in court in her bid to obtain records on rejected absentee ballots in Alaska. At the same time, the latest ballot count on Wednesday night narrowed her small lead over rival Dan Sullivan further.

On Wednesday, an Alaska judge rejected the Peltola campaign's request for the records in the midterm election's final uncalled Senate race. The ruling said the demand was 'simply not reasonable' while election officials continue counting votes.

Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews sided with the Alaska Division of Elections. He found the agency is currently busy processing ballots from the 2026 general election and lacks the capacity to generate the report from the voter registration database.

Matthews wrote: 'Even if the request were otherwise considered reasonable outside the peak election time of year, it is simply not reasonable nor required right now.' He added that 'the timing of the campaign's request could simply not be worse.'

The Peltola campaign sued last week seeking to learn which absentee ballots were flagged for rejection and why. Campaign attorney Abha Kelly told the court the process was 'going incredibly smoothly' and that the campaign was not seeking confidential data or trying to disrupt the count. She argued the request would simply centralise, in one place, transparency that observers already have in a decentralised way.

State attorneys countered that the records are not public because voters' privacy interests are involved. Assistant Attorney General Margaret Paton-Walsh said: '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.'

The state also said producing such a customised report during peak election work would impose a significant burden. Matthews said at Tuesday's hearing that the case was not about who won or lost the election, but about access to records under the Public Records Act. The Sullivan campaign was allowed to intervene in the case.

With roughly 86 percent of the expected vote counted and more than 248,000 ballots tallied, Peltola held 121,487 first-choice votes (48.9 percent) to incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan's 117,512 (47.3 percent), a lead of 3,975 votes.

With neither candidate above 50 percent, the race remains on track for ranked-choice tabulation after absentee counting concludes around 18 November. Certification is expected on 25 November.

Votes for the other candidates in the race could also prove decisive. Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. has 4,100 votes and Gerald Heikes has 5,426 votes. Those totals exceed the current margin between the top two candidates. Under Alaska's ranked-choice system, when lower finishers are eliminated, their second-choice preferences are redistributed, so those votes could decide the outcome.

At the same time, the vote to repeal that voting system is failing by 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent, which is also still too close to call more than a week after Election Day.