In Republican Joe Miller’s latest effort to question the results of the Alaska Senate race, his campaign has set-up a voter fraud hotline to handle all of the “serious allegations of fraud, voter intimidation and voter bullying” that have been surfacing since election day, and says that his team may file a lawsuit for information pertaining to the claims.
The tea-party backed Miller, who beat Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the Republican primary, now appears to trail her in the general election. Murkowski launched a nearly unprecedented write-in campaign — and the write-in votes outnumber votes for Miller by thousands. Write-in ballots are now being examined to see how many are for Murkowski.
Floyd Brown, who was famously behind the “Willie Horton” ad that put a damper on Michael Dukakis’s presidential run in 1988, signed on this week to be an adviser to the Miller campaign during the write-in count.
The Anchorage Daily News reports that in a press conference yesterday, Brown “suggested possible voter fraud in Alaska’s election but stopped short of saying the campaign was making that allegation.”
Brown cited an affidavit from Rocky MacDonald, a poll watcher in Fairbanks, who said that the ballot box in his precinct “was unsecured in that the electoral judges had access to the inside of the ballot box with a key.”
“The electoral judges opened the ballot box several times to clear jammed ballots and rearrange by hand the ballots in the box to make space for new ballots,” he wrote.
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The Miller campaign has previously alleged that a federal contractor electioneered for Murkowski at a military job site right before the election. Here’s the clip of the worker, which Miller and Mike Huckabee discussed on Fox News:
In a press release sent out last night, the campaign announced that it had established a voter fraud hotline to handle the “many reports of possible voter fraud” that they’ve gotten, including “serious allegations of fraud, voter intimidation and voter bullying.” Brown continued: “To facilitate collection of this material for law enforcement or legal review, we thought it best to establish a centralized number where people could call, anonymously if need be, and leave information. We encourage any citizen who has a concern to call this number.”
The release also says that the campaign intends to sue for copies of voter registers from the Division of Elections so they can compare the number of voters who signed in with the number of ballots. According to Brown, the DOE said it was “too busy” to provide copies, so “the Campaign will be forced to ask a judge in Juneau to order the state to produce these registers.”
Murkowski campaign manager Kevin Sweeney dismissed the claims, saying that “for the Miller campaign, it’s become desperate time.”
“He’s making accusations without giving any meat to those accusations,” Sweeney said.
