Senate Races to Watch: Alaska Judge Rules Against Peltola
Among all the senate races to watch after the 2026 midterm elections, Alaska's contest for the United States Senate is the last one still undecided, and on Wednesday it took a turn into the courtroom. A state judge ruled against Democratic candidate Mary Peltola's request for the immediate release of records identifying rejected absentee ballots, a decision that leaves the race uncalled, with thousands of ballots still to be counted. Peltola leads the incumbent Republican, Senator Dan Sullivan, by a narrow margin, and the outcome of the race will decide whether Democrats finish the midterms with 55 seats in the Senate or 56. The ruling is a setback for Peltola's campaign, but it does not decide the election, and both sides are now waiting on the count itself.
The Ruling: Why the Judge Said the Request Was Not Reasonable
Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews ruled on Wednesday that the Peltola campaign's request for the immediate release of records identifying rejected absentee ballots was "not reasonable." The campaign had asked the court to order the Alaska Division of Elections to hand over the absentee register, a record showing whether each returned absentee ballot was accepted or rejected, along with the identities of the voters involved and the reasons for each rejection. Judge Matthews held that the Division of Elections is "currently busy processing ballots from the 2026 general election" and "simply lacks the capacity to generate the report from" the voter registration database at the behest of Peltola's campaign. "Even if the request were otherwise considered reasonable outside the peak election time of year, it is simply not reasonable nor required right now," the ruling said.
The reasoning turned on timing as much as on the law. Alaska's election workers are in the middle of processing the remaining ballots from the November 3 election, and the judge accepted the state's argument that forcing the Division to build a new report in the middle of the count would burden the workers doing that job and could slow the count itself. The Division had also argued that the information the campaign wants is preliminary and subject to change, and that it is protected by voters' constitutional right to privacy. State officials added that the records are not distributed separately while the count is unfinished, in part because the voters whose ballots were rejected have not yet been given access to that information themselves.
The decision came after oral arguments on Tuesday morning at the Nesbett Courthouse in Anchorage, where the campaign, the state, and the Sullivan campaign all made their cases. The speed of the ruling, issued the day after the hearing, reflects how quickly the court moved to settle a dispute that was unfolding while ballots were still being counted. For Peltola's campaign, the loss means it will not get the list of rejected ballots it wanted before the count is finished, and it will have to rely on the state's ordinary review process, rather than its own check of the records, to make sure its supporters' votes were counted.
The Lawsuit and the Fight Over Rejected Absentee Ballots
Peltola's campaign, operating under the committee name Alaskans for Mary, filed suit last week against the state Division of Elections, elections chief Carol Beecher, and Lieutenant Governor Nancy Dahlstrom, whose office supervises elections. The complaint says the state turned down requests first made on October 27 for the absentee register showing whether each returned ballot was accepted or rejected, or other records naming the voters involved and the reasons. The campaign argues the state is breaking the Alaska Public Records Act and says it cannot make sure its supporters' lawful votes were counted without that information. Alaska has no process for voters to fix minor mistakes on absentee ballots, which makes the records especially important to the campaign: a ballot rejected for a small error cannot be corrected, and the only question is whether it was rejected correctly.
The Sullivan campaign moved on Monday to join the lawsuit, asking the Anchorage judge to let it take part. In its filing, the campaign said it shares an interest in an accurate count but argued that Peltola wants to identify preliminarily rejected ballots it believes came from Democrats and then lobby officials to count them outside the review process set out in state law. "Peltola now asks this Court to disregard the law and to short-circuit the legally prescribed process for ensuring that every lawful ballot is counted," the Sullivan campaign argued. The state Department of Law opposed releasing the records, saying the information is preliminary, is protected by voters' privacy rights, and would burden election workers during ballot processing.
The scale of the rejected-ballot question is modest but not meaningless in a race this close. About 1,300 absentee ballots were rejected in the 2024 general election in Alaska, and even a fraction of that number could matter when the margin between the candidates is measured in thousands of votes. The campaign says it needs the names now, while the count is still open; the state says the same information will be available through the ordinary process once the count is complete. Judge Matthews sided with the state, at least for now.
A Race Still Undecided: Voter Turnout and Mail-In Voting
The election results behind the lawsuit show why both campaigns are fighting so hard over every ballot. As of late Wednesday, media tallies showed Peltola with a 1.6 percent lead, with 86 percent of the votes counted. A count released Tuesday night added almost 25,000 ballots and widened her lead, with 245,470 first-choice ballots counted: Peltola at 48.8 percent with 118,926 votes, Sullivan at 47.1 percent with 114,676 votes, a lead of 4,250 votes. About 40,000 ballots the Division has accepted are still not in the results, and absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day can still arrive through Friday from inside the United States and through November 18 from overseas. The Associated Press estimated that about 84 percent of all ballots had been counted.
The pattern of the count so far favors Peltola. She has won about 56 percent of the early votes and 59 percent of the absentee votes counted so far, to Sullivan's 42 percent and 39 percent, while Sullivan won 50 percent of Election Day votes to Peltola's 45 percent. Because the ballots still to be counted are disproportionately absentee and early votes, the trend suggests her lead could grow, though nothing is certain until the count is complete. By one analysis of the state's numbers, Peltola would clear 50 percent outright, with no ranked-choice count needed, if she wins about 57 percent of the votes still to be counted, while Sullivan would finish ahead in a final round only if he won about 54 percent or more of the remaining votes cast for him or Peltola.
The broader context makes the race the most important of the remaining senate races to watch. Overall in the midterm elections, Democrats won a majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, while President Donald Trump's Republican Party suffered heavy losses in congressional and state races. With Alaska still undecided, Democrats hold a 55-to-44 Senate edge in the midterm tally, and an Alaska win would give them 56 seats. That extra seat would widen the majority the new Senate Democratic leadership will carry into January, when it takes up the party's first measures, and it would give the party a little more room for defections on close votes.
Ranked Choice and the Other Dan Sullivan
Alaska does not count votes the way most states do, and that is the other reason this race is still open. Voters rank up to four candidates, and a candidate who clears 50 percent of first-choice votes wins outright. If nobody does, the last-place candidate is eliminated and that candidate's ballots flow to whichever name those voters ranked next, until someone passes 50 percent. No one is close to 50 percent of first-choice votes in the Senate race, so the official tabulation is all but certain, and the Division of Elections is scheduled to run it on November 18, after the last absentee ballots arrive. The state's target date for certifying the election is November 25.
An analysis of the ballots counted so far suggests Peltola would narrowly win a ranked-choice final round, with about 50.7 percent of the vote. On the ballots counted so far, the second choices of voters who backed the minor candidates break in ways that help her: ballots that ranked the other Dan Sullivan first split about 29 percent to Peltola, 17 percent to the independent candidate Gerald Heikes, and 16 percent to the senator, with the rest stopping. Even if every ballot missing from the file that ranked Heikes, the younger Sullivan, or a write-in first ended up with the senator, Peltola would still finish more than 2,500 votes ahead on the count so far, according to the analysis. That is not a final result, but it explains why her campaign is confident.
The race has also been shadowed by the presence of a second candidate named Dan Sullivan on the ballot, a retired teacher from the town of Petersburg whose full name is Daniel J. Sullivan. He has drawn 4,027 votes so far, while Heikes has drawn 5,318. The same-name candidacy roiled the race before Election Day: the Trump administration sued in an effort to block certification if Sullivan lost, arguing that the presence of the spoiler candidate warranted an investigation, and a federal judge threw out that lawsuit on November 1, ruling that the government had no standing to force the state to segregate ballots and that such a move would violate voters' right to a secret ballot. The administration appealed, and President Trump weighed in on social media, saying the votes tied to the other Dan Sullivan should be given to the incumbent. Peltola, a former member of the United States House of Representatives and the first Alaska Native elected to Congress, is trying to unseat Sullivan, who won the seat in 2014 and was reelected in 2020.
What Happens Next for the Alaska Senate Race
The calendar now decides the race. Domestic absentee ballots must arrive by Friday, November 13, and overseas ballots can arrive as late as November 18, the same day the Division of Elections is scheduled to run the ranked-choice tabulation. The results are due to be certified on November 25. The rejected-ballot question is not over either: the campaign could renew its request for the records once the count is finished, when the judge's reasoning about the burden on election workers no longer applies, and the ordinary public records process may produce the information in time for any challenge before certification.
Watch first for the next count update and whether the remaining absentee ballots break toward Peltola as the early returns suggest they will. Watch second for the ranked-choice tabulation on November 18, which will decide the race if neither candidate clears 50 percent outright, as now seems likely. Watch third for any further court action, whether a renewed records request from the Peltola campaign or a challenge tied to the same-name candidate, which has already drawn the Trump administration into the race once. The Alaska Senate race is the last of the 2026 senate races to watch, and its outcome will set the final margin of the Democratic majority that takes power in January.
Source: Reuters