Nate Silver: Uncounted Votes May Push Begich Past Stevens

[Ichingcarpenter]

Although Ted Stevens currently holds a lead of approximately 3,200 votes in ballots counted to date in Alaska's senate contest, there is good reason to believe that the ballots yet to be counted -- the vast majority of which are early and absentee ballots -- will allow Mark Begich to mitigate his disadvantage with Stevens and quite possibly pull ahead of him.

The reasoning behind this is simple: some early ballots have been processed, and among those ballots Begich substantially leads Stevens. A tally of Alaska's 40 house districts as taken from Alaska's Division of Elections webpage suggests that Begich has won about 61% of the early ballots counted so far, as compared with 48% of ballots cast on Election Day itself.


Combining the already-counted votes with our allocation of early, absentee and questioned ballots produces a projected total of 142,174 votes for Mark Begich and 139,258 for Ted Stevens -- a win for the Democrat by approximately 3,000 ballots:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/uncounted-votes-may-push-begich-past.html

[Ichingcarpenter]

1. kick...... Nate Silver has been the genius on polls this election cycle

he did a good analysis on this one too

[SoCalDem]

2. This actually works FOR Sarah too..

Lisa-Lisa's term is up in '10...as is Sarah's.. I see her running against Lisa in the primaries, and winning..

By then, she'll be far enough away from Nov 4, and she might win that senate seat.. That would put her in DC , just in time for the wacky Freeps to push her into the '12 fray..

She would lose, of course, and then have to do the rest of her 6 yrs as an ineffective back-bencher (Think Katherine Harris)...and provide us all with some humor:)