ANCHORAGE, Alaska — UPDATE to Awaaz Punjab's earlier report, which had Democrat Mary Peltola leading Republican Senator Dan S. Sullivan by 626 first-choice votes: the first-choice lead is still Peltola's in the Associated Press's latest count on Wednesday, November 4, 2026 — 102,962 votes to 102,325, a margin of 637 — but the first independent ranked-choice tally of the ballots counted so far points the other way. FairVote's preliminary tabulation of Alaska's cast vote record, published on Wednesday, puts Sullivan ahead 51 per cent to 49 per cent once the preferences of eliminated candidates are transferred, and Sullivan's own campaign says its simulation of the ranked-choice rounds ends with the incumbent ahead by 328 votes. The AP still rates the race Too Early to Call, and the official tabulation is not scheduled until November 18.
The AP table for Senate Race 3079 shows 304 of Alaska's 403 precincts reporting — 75.43 per cent — with an estimated 75.49 per cent of the vote counted. Peltola stands at 48.2 per cent of first choices and Sullivan at 47.9 per cent; retired schoolteacher Daniel J. Sullivan, the unaffiliated namesake candidate, holds 3,600 votes (1.7 per cent), and Republican Gerald Heikes holds about 2.3 per cent, fewer than 5,000 votes. Neither leader is anywhere near the 50 per cent first-choice majority that would end the contest without a ranked-choice redistribution.
Two projections, one opposite answer
FairVote, a nonpartisan group that studies ranked-choice voting, built its tally from the preliminary cast vote record the Alaska Division of Elections released on election night — an anonymised digital record of most ballots counted so far. It found that Sullivan's margin grows by about half a point in the ranked-choice count: among voters who ranked Republican Gerald Heikes first, 44 per cent ranked Sullivan next and 16 per cent ranked Peltola; among voters who ranked the namesake candidate Daniel J. Sullivan first, 33 per cent transferred to Peltola and 22 per cent to the senator. FairVote is explicit about the limits of its exercise: the ballots in the cast vote record do not match the reported first-choice results one-to-one — in that tranche Sullivan, not Peltola, holds the most first-choice support — and thousands of ballots are still to arrive, so the preliminary tally is a guide to how transfers behave, not a result.
The Sullivan campaign's Wednesday analysis, reported by The Alaska Story, reaches the same destination by a slightly different road. Starting from Peltola's 626-vote first-choice lead in the tally it cited (102,701 to 102,075), the campaign applied transfer patterns from the state's scanned ballot records — a rankings file covering 204,530 of the 215,335 ballots counted at that point — and found Peltola's lead first growing when Daniel J. Sullivan is eliminated (1,039 of his ballots transfer to her, 586 to the senator), then disappearing in the final round: Sullivan 105,037, Peltola 104,709, a lead of 328 votes and 50.08 per cent of the ballots still in play. The campaign also said it found 70 ballots on which voters marked both Sullivans as their first choice; under Alaska's rules, marking more than one candidate at the same rank invalidates that ranking. These are the incumbent campaign's own figures, published to make its case, and they have not been adopted by the AP or the Division of Elections.
Alaska requires a majority, not a plurality. If no candidate passes 50 per cent of first choices, the last-placed candidates are eliminated one by one and their ballots move to each voter's next choice. A candidate can therefore lead the first count and still lose the tabulation — which is exactly what both Wednesday projections suggest could happen to Peltola.
The 'double Dan' dispute, and a widened Justice Department probe
Running alongside the arithmetic is the dispute over the second Sullivan on the ballot. Republicans have long alleged, as Reuters reported in a November 4 explainer, that retired teacher Dan J. Sullivan was a spoiler candidate meant to confuse voters who wanted the incumbent; Republicans tried to remove him from the ballot as not a 'good faith' candidate, and Alaska's highest court rebuffed that argument. The New York Times reported last week that Peltola's campaign helped recruit him into the race — an allegation Peltola's campaign has denied. Ten of 11 Sullivan supporters interviewed by Reuters on Election Day said they did not think confusion over the two Dans would affect the outcome.
The Trump administration's Justice Department has launched a criminal probe into the recruitment allegations and widened it this week, Reuters reported: department officials have sent letters to more than 20 people notifying them they are subjects of the probe, among more than 140 letters, subpoenas and notices sent in total, including to prominent voting-rights lawyer Marc Elias, whose firm has represented Democrats including Peltola and who has denied any wrongdoing. FBI agents also questioned donors to Dan J. Sullivan ahead of the election, and Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy ordered a state investigation whose spokesman said on Tuesday it was ongoing. A Justice Department letter is not evidence of guilt, and no court has found fraud in the race. Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Tuesday: 'The Department of Justice has been fighting tooth and nail to stop this process. We're not going to stop the fight even after today.'
Background: a Republican state, a centrist challenger, a majority already decided
Sullivan, first elected in 2014, is seeking a third term in a state Donald Trump won by 13 points in 2024, though Alaska keeps an independent streak and bipartisan coalitions control both of its legislative chambers, Reuters noted. Peltola is a centrist Democrat who served one term in the U.S. House, from 2022 to 2025. Democrats have already secured at least 54 Senate seats on Wednesday's counts, so Alaska — like Mississippi, the only other uncalled Senate race — will set the size of the new majority rather than decide control: a Peltola win would make her the 55th member of the Democratic caucus. Peltola herself set expectations on election night: 'It won't be hours, it won't be days, it will be weeks.'
What happens next
Alaska accepts ballots up to November 18 — including mail ballots flown in from remote communities — and officials will not conduct the official ranked-choice tabulation before that date. The Division of Elections' next scheduled count updates are Tuesday, November 10, and Friday, November 13, with the tabulation itself set for Wednesday, November 18. If Peltola does win, Reuters noted, Republicans could seek to appeal her victory and block her from being seated, though they will have less leverage with Democrats controlling the Senate from January. Until November 18, every projection — FairVote's, the Sullivan campaign's, and the first-choice count itself — remains provisional.