BREAKING: Federal Judge Halts Certification of Alaska Senate Election Results

Above the post update:
Details now, but it's a strange ruling:

The district court judge has ordered that the election certification be halted if Miller files his lawsuit in state court by Monday. It's exceptionally unclear to me what jurisdiction the district court judge has to tell the Division of Elections or the state court what to do if he is dismissing the lawsuit. Maybe a lawyer who has dealt with a "conditional" injunction like this can put me some knowledge.

Ordinarily, since the federal judge is saying this is a state matter which it can't remedy, the court would dismiss the lawsuit. Then Miller could go to the state court and seek his injunction there, where he has a possibility of getting a remedy. But that's not what happened here. The federal judge seems to be saying, "Your lawsuit's not properly in front of me, but I'll usurp the Alaska court's prerogative to issue an injunction in this matter and just do it myself anyway."

Explanation? It's not my area of law, so somebody learn me something.

Original Post:
Just coming across Fox News now, but doesn't seem to be a slam dunk for Miller. ADN tweets that a federal judge has "conditionally" halted certification of the results.

I suspect this is just a temporary stay to preserve the status quo while the judge considers the merits of Miller's prelim injunction request. And the fact that the judge suggested to the parties that this lawsuit should have been filed in state court rather than the federal district court makes me think that Miller's motion will not be granted.

Background on Miller's exact-spelling lawsuit is here.

More: The Alaska Division of Elections is done counting. Murky has a lead of about 10,400 votes. Miller has challenged 8,153 ballots. The Division was to certify results on November 29. Miller filed a motion for preliminary injunction yesterday to stop certification while his two lawsuits are pending.

Thursday's injunction [motion] modifies Miller's original lawsuit challenging how the state handled Murkowski's write-in campaign, in which Miller argued it was illegal for the state to accept write-in ballots with any kind of errors.

According to the state tally, Murkowski has a lead of about 10,400 votes. Even if the state threw out all of the write-in votes Miller's camp challenged, Murkowski would still lead by more than 2,000 votes.

However, the Miller campaign is now arguing in its injunction [motion] that the volunteers they recruited to observe the vote count did not have enough time to be properly trained because the write-in vote tally started ahead of schedule.

"My campaign team and I were forced to pull together volunteer observers at the last minute, and did not have time to adequately and fully recruit and train them before counting began," Miller wrote, the Associated Press reports. "As a result, an indeterminate number of ballots with candidates' names misspelled were counted without being challenged during the first several days of counting."

Note, in addition to his two lawsuits, Miller has stated his intention to ask for a recount. By statute, he cannot make an official request for a recount until after the Division of Elections has certified the result. (See Alaska Stat. Sec. 15.20.430.) So, assuming for a second he gets his injunction, we'd have to wait for the lawsuits to be resolved before he could have his recount.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 06:25 PM

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