Update: Nail-Biter

Murky is outperforming her election-day performance, which becomes a problem when she starts getting above 50%... below that, and she continues losing votes, above that, she eats into Miller's lead.

It looks like in most areas she will be above 50%. But how far above?

Counting from Miller's own stronghold of the Mat-Su valley (Palin's area) got him about +150 votes, which is okay, but not as many as Murky got from hers. He still has Fairbanks; but she still has "the bush," which, the thinking goes, will support her because they like her style of Big Daddy federal dollar subsidies.

5000+ votes have been counted, I think, leaving maybe 6000 to go, and Miller still has a 1400 vote edge.

4:29pm: The Anchorage Daily News reports that the latest batch of absentees came from the Mat-Su valley, specifically House Districts 13 through 16. Crunching the numbers myself, on election day, Murkowski won 38% of the vote in those districts. Among the absentees, she's picking up nearly 48% of the vote -- a much bigger improvement than among the Anchorage absentees, but she still has a long way to go.

Districts 13-16 The Anchorage Daily News reports this latest batch of new ballots was from Districts 13-16 -- the Mat-Su Valley (Palinland). Miller won 62.12% of the vote in those districts on Election Day, but he only won 52.33% of the new ballots from those districts. With all of today's ballots, Murkowski is now out-performing her Election Day numbers in all districts that have been counted today by 5.9%. If that were to continue in all districts across the state, she would need a total of 16,690 new ballots to be counted to pass Miller.

I don't know whose blog that's from -- if you know, please tell me.

Bear in mind Murky's overperformance, and Miller's underperformance, aren't really unexpected -- I always thought that these ballots would skew Murky due to the fact that many were cast long before Miller appeared viable (and before anyone really heard of him).

The ADN is also liveblogging the counting.

So is The Other McCain.

Hey, Guys! I Just Found A Stack of Ballots! But of course you did, darling.

posted by Ace at 04:54 PM

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