Stiking with Senator Stevens?

With the election now over for a week, the fate of the Senate is still unknown. The democrats have a clear majority of 57 seats to 40 seats. However, three races are still undecided. If the democrats win all three, they become filibuster-proof. There are currently recounts going on in Minnesota and Alaska, along with a runoff election in Georgia. The most strange election of the group seems to be that of Alaska where convicted felon Ted Stevens holds a narrow lead over Anchorage mayor Mark Begich. I became inspired to see what the blogosphere had to say about this after seeing this video.







Almost every blog agreed that something seemed wrong with this Senate race in Alaska.
The voter turnout was much higher in Alaska's primaries in 2008 than in 2004. The early voting was also in record numbers. Yet somehow when the votes were counted for the general election, record lows were recorded despite Alaska having the third greatest amount of voters registered in their history. Also, with Governor Palin on the ticket in an election with such high stakes, and a divisive recently convicted felon on the ballot, record lows seemed very suspiscious. The whole situation in Alaska has generated a lot of suspicion from the blogs that I read.


At Huffington Post, Alaskan blogger Shannyn Moore said that the election in Alaska must have been stolen. Her article began, "Something stinks." She then talked about all of the facts above and also talked about how all polling had Mark Begich ahead by around 8 percent and that all of this could not just be a coincidence. She also noted that in a Congressional race, democrat Ethan Berkowitz was also ahead by 8 points in polling and now trails by 8 points in the results. She said that this appeared to be a horrible violation of democracy.

Over at Talking Points Memo, John Marshall said that he felt that Sarah Palin had rigged the election in favor of Stevens so that Palin could run for senate if Stevens is sent to prison. He clearly had a liberal bias, however he did bring up an interesting conspiracy theory.

A new site I've looked at called fivethirtyeight.com had 2 interesting entries from Nate Silver. Smith is a famous baseball probability blogger turned political probability blogger. In his first article Silver wrote that the odds were still with Begich because of all of the uncounted ballots (30,000) to win the election. In his second post, entitled "What in the Hell Happened in Alaska?" Silver said that he thought fraud was probably occurring. The polling from his site was 12-14 points off for the disputed Senate, Congressional, and even Presidential races in Alaska. Many votes are being deemed "questionable ballots," and Silver believes that these may very well be mostly democratic ballots.

Mary Pemberton at Real Clear Politics blogged about how Stevens would not even get in to the Senate if elected. She also talked about how many Alaskans may just genuinely have liked what Stevens has done in the Senate for 40 years, even if he is a convicted felon.

At Caffinated Politics, dekerivers said that the reason voting is so low is because no absentee ballots were counted until this week out of fear that people might vote twice as occurred in the primaries in Alaska. This is a counter idea to the many fraud allegations swirling.

Whether or not fraud has occurred is still unknown. The results of the election in Alaska are just as unclear. There are reasonable arguments from both sides of the fraud allegations. We will have to see in the coming weeks what unfolds here in Alaska.