Alaska Election Day Updates: Polls are now closed statewide

Many Alaskans left to the ballot boxes on Tuesday to vote for president, U.S. House and state candidates, and they will also decide two ballot measures. Check back for new updates throughout the evening as returns come in.

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Polls are now closed

Update at 8 p.m: The polls in Alaska are closed. Returns will be shipped by Alaska Department of Elections later in the evening.

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Candidates in the tight US House race await results in Anchorage

The Democratic US Rep. Mary Peltola and her Republican challenger Nick Begich III both planned events in Anchorage on Tuesday. Peltola was scheduled to appear at a party hosted by her campaign at 49th State Brewing downtown. Begich’s party was a few blocks away at the Marriott hotel.

Both candidates had spent the day before the election in Anchorage casting their ballots. Begich said he didn’t wait long at the early voting location in Eagle River. Peltola faced a two-hour line at the Anchorage City Hall polling place late Monday morning. Begich and Peltola also spent some of the final hours before votes closing sign waivers at busy Anchorage intersections.

Otherwise, the election day agenda for Peltola included “pace,” she said Tuesday morning.

Alaska’s lone congressional race is seen as one of the most competitive in the nation in what is again expected to be a closely divided House. The election drew tens of millions of dollars in ad spending and weeks of attacks on both Peltola and Begich.

Begich said Monday that he was “feeling cautiously optimistic.”

Peltola said she has “much more gratitude” this year compared to 2022, when she first won the seat. She said her campaign was helped by an army of volunteers who knocked on doors and made phone calls on her behalf.

“We don’t build the plane as we fly it,” she said.

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Polls open everywhere except for two villages in western Alaska

Polls opened statewide at 7 a.m. Tuesday, but not in two western Alaska villages, according to the Division of Elections.

The vote in St. George, where 31 registered voters live, did not begin until 14 due to a storm, Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher said Tuesday.

The polling station also did not open as planned in Wales, where 63 registered voters live. Beecher said a team of election workers was ready to send to the community but was “waiting for weather to permit travel.”

The Wales district opened at 4:00 p.m., after which all polling stations throughout the state functioned as scheduled.

Wales, a village in western Alaska, also did not open voting for the August primary. The Division of Elections said at the time that it had tried to find new poll workers to open the precinct, but none were available.

Beecher said Monday that the Division of Elections had planned to send poll workers to Egegik, a village in southwest Alaska, so the polling place could open as scheduled Tuesday for the village’s 96 registered voters.

Meanwhile, downed power lines in South Anchorage left 3,100 people without power. The outage affected some voters at Tudor Elementary School, who briefly cast ballots using flashlights until power was restored.

(Election Day in Alaska: How to vote, what’s on the ballot, when to expect results)

Polling places will be open throughout the state until 8 p.m. Alaskans can find their polling place online. In Anchorage, voters can also cast their ballots at Ted Stevens International Airport and at the Division of Elections offices in Midtown, regardless of their voting precinct.

The Elections Department’s website was temporarily offline Tuesday morning due to a high volume of web traffic. The home page was back online shortly before

Counting of ballots

When the polls close, election workers are expected to begin counting in-person ballots on Tuesday, along with some cast early votes and mail-in ballots that arrived at Alaska Division of Elections offices in late October.

That leaves thousands of early and absentee ballots not counted until a week after Election Day, meaning some close races could remain without a clear winner until later this month.

The Division of Elections expects to count just over 31,000 mail-in ballots Tuesday night, but only 155 of those came from rural areas of the state, including the North Slope and Southwest, Western and Northwest Alaska.

(Photos: Election Day in Anchorage)

The Division of Elections reported that about 79,000 absentee ballots had been issued to voters and that nearly 49,000 of them had been returned as of Sunday. Absentee ballots arriving from abroad can be counted as long as they arrive at the Department of Elections within 15 days of Election Day.

In addition, nearly 62,000 Alaskans cast ballots by Tuesday at one of a dozen early voting locations.

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