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15 Nov 2010 23:21

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Politics: Lisa Murkowski: Very close to beating Joe Miller in Alaska

  • 92,164 votes in favor of Lisa Murkowski right now
  • 90,458 number of votes Joe Miller has in the election at this point
  • 7,601 number of write-in votes Miller’s camp has contested so far
  • 10k number of write-in votes Murkowski is expected to get after today source
  • » 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.

11 Nov 2010 11:02

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Politics: Alaska Senate: Early write-in counts favor Lisa Murkowski

  • 98% of write-in votes favor Lisa Murkowski so far source
  • » 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.

10 Nov 2010 10:48

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Politics: WTF argument of the day: Murkowski misspellings “protest 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

03 Nov 2010 20:50

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Politics: In Alaska, Scott McAdams may not have won, but he kinda did

  • People had to be convinced (Scott McAdams) could beat Joe Miller, and if he had two more weeks he could have done that. Scott would have won if Lisa hadn’t jumped in.
  • Alaska Democratic Party spokesperson Deborah Williams • Sounding bullish about Scott McAdams’ future success in Alaska politics. McAdams entered the Senate race with the mere intention of drawing attention towards his own political abilities, which the election did – and then some. Even though he lost Tuesday (unlike Joe Miller, he conceded to Lisa Murkowski already), his political stock went way up in a race which drew disproportionate amounts of attention thanks to the war of words between the other two candidates. “He could look at anything from state senator to governor to Congress,” Williams said. “He’s certainly got options.” See, being a third party to an unbelievably messy situation can be beneficial sometimes! source

03 Nov 2010 10:10

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Politics: Lisa Murkowski hopes people know how to spell her last name

  • 41% of votes went to write in votes, presumably for Lisa Murkowski
  • 34.2% of votes went to Joe Miller, who’s not willing to give up his fight
  • 23.7% of votes went to Scott McAdams, who won’t be heading to DC source
  • » When will we know? It’s probably going to be a while. The issue of “voter intent” will likely come up in this election with the write-ins, which will inevitably have misspellings due to the fact that Murkowski has a complicated last name. (Though Murkowski has done tons of work to let people know how to spell it.) Miller’s folks won’t concede until after there’s been a hand count.

29 Oct 2010 21:26

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Politics: Breitbart blog injects more fun into AK Senate race

  • 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

18 Oct 2010 15:30

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Politics, U.S.: Joe Miller bleeding support in Alaska

  • 7% decrease in Joe Miller’s support over last month 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.
 

11 Oct 2010 19:28

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Politics: The never-ending foibles of Joe Miller

  • then Miller said at a town hall meeting last week that he supports repealing the 17th Amendment, which allows voters (rather than state legislators) to elect Senators .
  • now Miller now says that amending the constitution isn’t “a practical solution,” and blames Lisa Murkowski for making him say what he said. Or something. source

28 Sep 2010 10:37

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Politics: Lisa Murkowski turns primary loss into comeback kid bid

She’s certainly making things interesting, isn’t she? Murkowski has amassed a huge amount of support as a write-in. Take that, Sarah! source

18 Sep 2010 10:52

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Politics: Lisa Murkowski jumps into the abyss with write-in senate campaign

  • She most assuredly won’t win, and Sarah Palin and her friends are angry. Lisa Murkowski isn’t going to let a guy with a beard into the Senate without a fight. The Alaska senator is launching a write-in campaign to get her seat back. “My heart is Alaska, and I cannot leave you. I cannot stop what we have started,”she said. For the Republican party as a whole, this is fairly misguided. See, a write-in senate candidate has won ONCE in U.S. history – Strom Thurmond’s 1954 election. It has the potential to split the vote between Murkowski and Republican nominee Joe Miller, plus she has to deal with petty attacks like this one from sworn enemy Palin: “It’s a futile effort on her part, it really is.” source