I don’t have any way to check the start dates for all those regional managers short of a PRA request and I ain’t doing that for this blog. I know that the Director is a Republican appointee but I can’t remember if Gail was appointed late in Murkowski and kept or is a Palin/Parnell appointee, but I think she’s Palins. I know that if she was a Murkowski appointee that any of Palin’s buddies had issues with, she’d have been long gone; Palin was good at running off Republicans. As to the rest of them, they serve at the pleasure and if anybody had a problem with them, are about the easiest public employees to get rid of because they are statutorily exempt from the State Personnel Act. They all work for the Lt. Gov., Craig Campbell who is a Palin true believer and is only in that spot because she put him there, and his COS, John Cramer, is the former City Mgr. of Wasilla when Palin was mayor there. If there are holdover Democrats anywhere in there, they’re welll down the organization and have kissed the ring.

In any event, if somehow there is some Democrat sleeper cell in the Miller Campaign’s alternate universe, the only thing they have to do is fill out the challenge form.

The ADN reporter said that, but they sometimes don’t use language, shall we say, precisely. We do know they had one district in Anchorage to add to the total because it wasn’t properly uploaded election night and the questioned ballots have been reviewed but not yet counted, so these could have been Anchorage questioned ballots. Frankly, I don’t know what they are, but you can’t be sure they’re absentees just because Sean says they are. All we know is that whatever kind of ballots they were, they came from 17 – 26 which is Anchorage proper.

It was public record on election day that there had been around 19K requests for absentee ballots. How many would actually be returned was speculative and every wannabe pundit was speculating. It was known within a day or so that there were around 8 – 9K questioned ballots. So those numbers alone are enough to know that as many as 25K or more ballots are still uncounted. Where the 8K came from I don’t know, but there were several announcements, almost daily of how many absentees were in Elections’ hands, a number still rising and which will continue to rise until the cutoff for domestic mailing at ten days and international mailing at 15 days. My speculation is that reporters, pundits, and bloggers who don’t generally know much about stuff anyway siezed on somebody’s statement about how many Absentees were in Elections’ hands on Election Night without any thought for the fact that they still had 15 days to come in. One unique kind of absentee here is the fact that you can vote early and at the airports by absentee. People here travel a lot and it is very common for people who are travelling over Election Day to either go to an Elections office and vote early or vote absentee at the airport on the way. Now I didn’t just learn this stuff in studying this election; everybody with any business at the operative level in Alaska politics knows these rules like a Baptist minister knows the New Testament.

I think it was a deliberate strategem on the Miller Campaign’s part to start howling about vote fraud because they first wanted to whip up their support and get a bunch of attention and second wanted to try to cow the Party and the NRSC; that part worked. It is essentially equivalent to pressuring Lisa into even though she’s a AAA member not calling for a tow but rather pushing her car to the gas station. The NRSC is a group comprised of incumbent senators who contribute money to that group so that members of the group can support the group’s efforts. Yes, they do solicit donations from common citizens, but if those citizens don’t know what the NRSC is and what it does with the money, shame on them.

I don’t know what that idiot Mike Roman thought he was doing or who he thought he was doing it for. I know the Murkowski Campaign designated him as one of their observers. I got the sense that he was the typical Beltway types who thought he could bully the rubes. Then van Flein did his work of fiction and a big fanciful press release that got picked up by every blogger who doesn’t know jack about Alaska. Anyway, Lt. Gov. Campbell, a creation of Sarah Palin, has said that van Flein’s complaint has little basis and the only bad act Roman seems to have committed is being rude to the nice old ladies at Elections.

And what sent me right out through the overhead was Erick picking up whatever crap the Miller Campaign was putting out and putting it here uncritically. I’ll give him credit for pulling the one down and even changing this one from its inflamatory repeated accusation of “there’s election stealin’ going on in Alaska,” but I think I might have had a bit to do with those changes.

It’s mostly a bandwidth and server space issue to do it this way. Anyway, this office covers all of the Southeast Alaska districts and maybe some other areas as well, maybe Kodiak Island and some Kenai Peninsula.

As a general matter so far, Murkowski has carried everything that is only accessible by boat or plane and Miller has carried everything accessible by road except Anchorage proper. The Juneau Regional Office covers places only accessible by air or water.

Both questioned and absentee ballots have been reviewed by polling place or Elections Office staff who have made a determination as to whether the voter can vote and for what ballot. Then in the canvassing process review panels of Elections’ Volunteers under supervision of Election’s staff and observed by campaign observers go through each ballot. 999 time out of a thousand, the Elections people are right and no observer challenges their decision. If the observer challenges, the Regional Manager makes a determination. If the observer disagrees, the Diviion Director makes a decision. Of the observer disagrees, the Courts decide. Once a districts ballot have been review, all that are not subject to challenge are counted by the OCR machine. The OCR machine is programmed to detect overcounts and undercounts and ballots that show an over or under count get a hand review and either observer can object to the determination.

the rural areas where English is often a second language and Gussak (White People in Yupik) processes aren’t always well understood. So, there may be some questioned ballots out there.

The Division of Elections people take the duty very seriously. It is a very intense process; the Elections staff have already made their determination as to whether the person can vote, on what ballot, and in what races. The review panel reviews the staff work and the observers may ask questions or object to what the staff or review panel decide. If they disagree it goes up. I’ve done it any you PAY ATTENTION and spend a lot of time wondering “did those signatures really match” or “should I have checked the map in case my memory was off on where that street is.” It ain’t easy work and it is almost all done by volunteers.

From Sean Cockerham at the Alaska Division of Elections office in Anchorage —

Update, 3:20 p.m.:

Partial vote in from Southeast and the Kenai Peninsula, with Murkowki picking up 2 votes on Miller.

Miller leads by 1,292 votes. But that’s with only about 1,300 votes coming in from Southeast and the Kenai so far, out of over 5,000 supposed to be counted today.

Nearly half of the tally in from southeast and the Kenai was for the Democratic primary, so there were only about 700 votes affecting the Miller-Murkowski race in the Republican primary.

The ballots just counted from Juneau and Kenai were questioned ballots. We’re still waiting for the absentees from those areas.

Also waiting on first results of questioned and absentee ballots from Fairbanks.

Read more: http://community.adn.com/adn/node/152974#ixzz0yEIFOu85

before they came here almost forty years ago, and they’re about quadra-lingual; I can speak town Southern, Country Southern, Black Southern, Alaska patois/standard English, and a little Yupik and Tlingit. See how I dropped that d in and. I actually like to write in dialect.

I was doing some research on a Confederate regiment and go into reading a lot of CW soldier letters. Back before Webster et al. standardized American English, a person’s voice was a roadmap; you could tell pretty much everything you needed to know about them by the way they spoke. See, e.g., “My Fair Lady.”

State employees really like to go home at 4:30. So, whatever hasn’t been counted, all domestic ballots get counted Friday. Well, actually, they can pretty much count whatever of those they want; they don’t have to count them all. And then the last count is on the 8th when all internationally mailed ballots must have been received.

It’s close but not that close, and Lisa should probably be working on her concession speach while Miller and his minions try practicing their dress up and go to town manners.

but if I hear you talk a bit, I can be within a couple of classes of how much education you have, a hundred miles or so of where you’re from, and have a pretty good idea if you can name your gg/grandfather’s regiment in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States.

Early in my working life with Yankee corporations in ATL, I learned that a Southern accent meant you had to be twice as good to be though half as much of, and you had to try to not end sentences with prepositions. So, I worked at Yankee and the fact that I had a Yankee wife helped, if help is the right word. Once I came to Alaska, I was in a world of expatriate Southerners and while some Alaskans would comment on a Southern accent in the same way my Grandma would say, “You a Yankee, aintcha?” it really was more of an advantage here than not to have at least a bit of the land of moonlight and magnolias in your voice.

Later on in my career, especially in my days as an advocate, I learned that a cultivated formal Southern accent was a REAL advantage. Now white trash, country Southern is my first language, but I had enough exposure to upper class Southern at the dinner table with the Preacher and at the Courthouse that it isn’t a foreign language. That soft, Virginia and North Carolina version of upper class Southern is pretty effective and persuasive; chick dig it too.

what you say about someone as long as you spell their name right. And you pretend to have an informed opinion that somebody should pay any attention to.

so he can throw out some more fake voter fraud complaints too.

I’d be very surprised, but not shocked if she conceded. I know I’d advise her to wait until the 8th when all the votes are counted. If she’s still behind then, asking for a recount is unseemly and it is time to go. Bitney, et. al. have access to better info than I do, so they may conclude it is a forlorn hope tonight, but I know I would never concede until all the votes are counted.

From Sean Cockerham at the Alaska Division of Elections office in Anchorage —

Update, 5:09 p.m.:

It’s looking bad for Lisa Murkowski.

The latest count of absentees increased Miller’s lead to 1,469 votes. That’s about 200 more votes for him than the last count. Fairbanks probably helped Miller, although the votes were also from Southeast and the Kenai Peninsula.

The Murkowski campaign was really counting on a big boost from Southeast.

That didn’t happen. The latest batch was a count of 2,760 votes. It brings the total counted today to about 15,700 votes. Still awaiting some more Kenai absentee votes and that will be all that is counted today.

The Division of Elections will has an additional roughly 9,000 votes to process. Some will be disqualified and more absentees could come in so the numbers aren’t firm. It’s also not clear how many are for the Republican primary race and how many are Democratic. Most will be counted on Friday with a final count of largely overseas absentees on Sept. 8.

Today was the biggest chunk of votes. Murkowski has cut Miller’s lead from 1,668 votes to 1,469 today. That’s not nearly what the Murkowski campaign had hoped for.

Read more: http://community.adn.com/adn/node/152974#ixzz0yEnxdfZO

So, basically, it is a philosophical question. If you’re watching the clock tick down the last minute or so and you know you can’t score enough points do you walk off the field or do you play it to the whistle? I’m a play it to the whistle guy, but YMMV.

how you’re going to get any Murkowski supporter to actually support you. Oh, they won’t go vote for the Democrat or the Third Party, but when you idiots started the “steal the election” and voter fraud crap, you gave a lot of people a lot of good reasons to mayby go hunting on Nov. 2.

They never called me and asked me for my support or even expressed any interest in what I might be interested in. Joe Miller represents the part of the State that Ben Stevens characterized as “Valley Trash.” I think that might have been harsh but not totally inaccurate. All you have to do is look at the district map the ADN published. If you can get to it by road, Miller carried it. If you need a boat or a plane, Murkowski carried it. That is a political divide in Alaska that you in the Lower 48 simply cannot comprehend, and it is also not a divide that I think Miller will even try to bridge. They think their ten districts ARE Alaska. Those of us who actually live in Alaska rather than Los Anchorage and its suburbs see the World a little differently.

For that matter, a lot of people here should try to rent a brain as well.