Joe Miller tried halt the write-in ballot counting in the Alaska Senate race, but failed when a federal judge ruled the count could continue. Murkowski is steadily gaining.
The Division of Elections has reviewed write-in ballots for almost half the precincts in Alaska and is counting nearly 98 percent of them for Lisa Murkowski. The Murkowski campaign is acting confident of victory and is accusing Joe Miller of taking "desperate" measures to try to win.
The state Thursday finished its second day of going through the write-in ballots in Juneau. More than 45,000 of them have been reviewed so far. Counting resumes this morning and is expected to continue through the weekend.
Meanwhile, Miller is living up to his paranoid, conspiracy theorist reputation and is calling foul play.
“At the end of the game, the Division of Elections decided to change the approach," Miller said on ABC News’ “Topline” program, accusing Murkowski of getting special treatment because of her family’s deep roots in the state.
“That’s exactly what’s happened here,” Miller went on. “You’ve got a standard that has never been applied to a write-in campaign.”
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“This same candidate knew at the outset of her campaign, when she ran commercial after commercial after commercial, that correct spelling was required,” Miller said. “Our perspective is simply that the rule of law is not being followed.”
Ah, the rule of law. That's rich, coming from Miller. His campaign is ramping up the fraud claims, but providing scant evidence.
Joe Miller campaign advisor Floyd Brown just came out and suggested the election was tainted by voter fraud and intimidation, but wouldn’t any provide examples of where that happened.
“The stories of manipulation are just almost mind boggling,” Brown said at a press conference called this afternoon by the Miller campaign.
The only evidence that the Miller campaign would provide was an affidavit from a poll watcher in Fairbanks, Rocky MacDonald, who complained that the ballot box at the Tanana Valley Fairgrounds “was unsecured in that the electoral judges had access to the inside of the ballot box with a key.”
“The electoral judges opened the ballot box several times to clear jammed ballots and rearrange by hand the ballots in the box to make space for new ballots,” MacDonald wrote.
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Brown told the story of a fisherman who was told to take a political sign off his boat or “the major corporate entity that takes his fish would no longer take it.” Brown wouldn’t provide the name of the fisherman, the town where he lived or the name of the corporation that made the alleged threat.
Floyd Brown, by the way, was the brains behind the infamous Willie Horton ads and just signed up to fight the PR battle for the Miller campaign during the ballot counting. So expect plenty of ugly in the next few days.