Muni Handcount Results Still Being Calculated

People were ready to count at 8am.  Things got underway for sure by 9.

There's been a lot of friendly work going on.  The Hall and Moe attorneys are helping each other out and cooperating closely.  In fact, the Hall attorney, Scott Kendall, argued Lisa Murkowski's case in Miller v. Treadwell so he's very familiar with all the details of the law on this.

From left to right - Moe attorney Patrick Munson, Muni Clerk Barb Jones, Hall Attorney Scott Kendall and Municipal Attorney Dennis Wheeler.


There's really no way I can tell you what the outcome might be.  I do know there are a lot of ballots that were written in Moe but the oval wasn't marked.

The break is over.  Back to work.

4:35  The election workers have gone home and now the Municipal Clerk and Scott Kendall, attorney for Ernie Hall, and Patrick Munson, attorney for Nick Moe are working together to read through and count the facsimile ballots.  These are questioned ballots.  They are people who live in District 3, but voted in another precinct - which is why they were questioned.  They are looking for people who wrote in Moe.  The Election office is not going to count these, but they are keeping them in the record so that if there is a court challenge, they will be able to retrieve them.

Now they are doing the same with absentee by mail - there is only one in this category that is a District 3 voter facsimile.

This is pretty esoteric now - really it seems to me that the main reason is to keep these on the record in case there is a court challenge.  They are now looking at absentee ballots that were faxed in.  They are now just looking at the ballots to see if there are any write-ins at all.  If not, it will be moot.

From left to right:  Kendall, Muni Attorney Dennis Wheeler, Muni Clerk Barbara Jones.  The guy on the right is from the Moe campaign.  

I've seen precincts that were ahead for Moe and others ahead for Hall and others that were dead even.  My anecdotal sense was the absentee-mail in favored Hall, but I really didn't see them all and most were not very big numbers. 

It turns out there were six Nick Moes written in in this batch of about 60 faxed in ballots.

I think they are relatively close to going back and counting out the totals for each of the different categories they've done today, but I don't know if I'll still be here when they do.  There aren't may people left here.  About 15, mostly from campaigns watching.


I can say that within the room where voting was counted things were as transparent as could be.  Everything was explained - I didn't always completely understand, but that was probably my failing powers of concentration as the day went on.   Also there was really no animosity at all between the representatives of the two candidates.  It was all very cordial and cooperative.  When there were questions about what to do next - the Municipal Clerk conferred with the two opposing candidates' attorneys.  The Municipal Clerk was around for consultation too.

[UPDATE:  I'm home now.  If you want to check on the results, you can go to the Municipal elections results page.  When they have the final count, they said they'd post it there.  I'm not sure if they will amend it to the results from April 2 or just make a new link for the recount totals.  I'd vote for the latter.  Enjoy Saturday night and remember, it's supposed to be a good aurora night, so look up.