Murkowski Ready to Call Victory
Fox News reports:
Alaska election officials have finished separating the write-in ballots, with the exception of a few hundred overseas ballots, and it appears Sen. Lisa Murkowski will be declared the winner.
Murkowski, who was defeated in the Republican primary by Tea Party favorite Joe Miller, mounted an unlikely but surprisingly successful write-in campaign in the general election
. Now after two weeks of vote counting, she has 92,715 uncontested votes, compared to Joe Miller's 90,448.
The elections department has counted an additional 8,153 votes for Murkowski which have been challenged by Miller observers due to minor misspellings, punctuation or poor penmanship. It appears that any court ruling on the challenged ballots will have no impact on the outcome, since Murkowski has an insurmountable lead even without them. The overseas ballots must be received by Wednesday./
Murkowski, seeking to make history as the first U.S. Senate candidate to win as a write-in since 1954, was returning to Alaska on Wednesday, where she planned to address supporters after those last ballots were tabulated.
Miller has maintained that if the math doesn't work in his favor, he'll stop fighting, and Murkowski's campaign manager, Kevin Sweeney, said that point had come -- and urged Miller to keep his word.
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