It’s never over until the count is done. I would encourage people to recognize that 255,000 votes were cast in the US Senate race and right now what we have is about a 2000 vote difference. Less than one percent.Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller • Holding on a little too closely to the belief that he still has a shot in the race. The AP called the race for Murkowski today, making her the first candidate since Strom Thurmond in 1954 to win a race on write-in ballots alone. Murkowski hasn’t declared victory today but she is expected to soon. Miller, however, whose campaign contested 8,153 ballots, is still behind by more than .5 percent, which means that if he wants a recount, he’s gonna have to pay for it himself. Look man, we understand you weren’t expecting Murkowski to win. But your cavalier attitude towards your opponents hurt you down the stretch. source (via • follow)
» So, to put it simply: Lisa Murkowski is on track to beat Joe Miller in Alaska, even after the contested votes with misspellings and other errors.
» And despite Joe Miller’s wishes: Murkowski misspellings are being allowed, making it so that she’s even more likely to win when all the votes are counted. It’s going to take five days to count every single one of the write-in votes.
The new policy makes no provision for the many voters who cast protest votes.A line from the lawsuit filed on behalf of Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller • Explaining that (stay with us, this gets confusing) write-in votes with Lisa Murkowski’s name spelled incorrectly are protest votes, intended to sabotage Murkowski’s widely-pushed campaign to get people to spell her name correctly on write-in votes. But Alaska doesn’t plan to consider them that way. “To the contrary,” the lawsuit states, “the state is indicating that it will now count a protest vote, deliberately cast with a misspelling as a vote for Murkowski. This effectively nullifies the protest and falsely inflates the vote for the write-in candidate. In short, the state has become a super-voter and will override voter intent and recast the votes for the candidate the state chooses.” Or perhaps people in fact aren’t as good at spelling as Miller’s lawyer gives them credit for. source (via • follow)
If ya can’t beat ‘em, drown ‘em in fake candidates. After defeating Lisa Murkowski in the primary, Joe Miller was a shoe-in to be the next Senator from Alaska. But then Murkowski announced a write-in campaign, and started gaining traction in the polls. So, Miller supporters did what any rational base would do: they flooded the list of write-in candidates (provided to voters at the polls) with as many names as possible, so that Murkowski’s name would be harder to spot. The effort, which originated on Andrew Breitbart’s “Big Government” blog, worked, and now there are over 100 “official” write-in candidates (many of them readers of “Big Government”). This race just gets better and better. source
» For a while, Joe Miller had it in the bag. But things have changed. It started when incumbent Lisa Murkowski, having lost the Republican primary to Miller, announced that she’d run a write-in campaign. Polls then began showing erosion of Miller’s popularity, with his negatives increasing by 6% in the last month. Then, news broke last night that Miller’s private security detail handcuffed and detained a reporter at a town hall meeting. Now, Nate Silver says that “any ordering of the top three candidates is possible.” This is a race to watch on November 2nd.
Hey Joe Miller, what you got to hide? You seem a little wary of talking to reporters for some reason, even to the point where you had a bunch of security guards detain the owner of a news site, who you discount as a “liberal blogger.” Why? What is the gain in it for you? It makes you seem like kind of a jerk. “While I’ve gotten used to the blog Alaska Dispatch’s assault on me and my family, I never thought that it would lead to a physical assault,” you say. Yeah, yeah. Fact of the matter is, you just had your cronies detain a legitimate member of the online press because he annoyed you. source
We have a constitutional requirement for somebody that’s gonna run for President. Of course, [Sarah Palin]’s qualified.Senate Candidate Joe Miller • When asked by Megyn Kelly whether or not Palin is qualified to be President. He’d earlier refused to answer the question, prompting an angry e-mail from Todd Palin. source (via)