Republican Joe Miller is officially not giving up in the Alaska Senate race.
Yesterday, he filed an injunction in federal court to stop the race from being certified for write-in candidate Sen. Lisa Murkowski. He also requested that all of the votes in the election be recounted.
Miller had originally filed a lawsuit that argued it was unconstitutional for the state to count misspelled ballots as votes for Murkowski. Now, he wants the state the prevent the election from being certified as part of that suit, which the motion describes as “infected with such constitutional infirmities.”
Though Murkowski won the race by 10,400 votes, with more than 2,000 of those votes uncontested by the Miller campaign, Miller still argues that his suit is not moot. Those 2,000 votes represent “less than 1% of the quarter-million-plus votes cast in this election.” If he is granted a recount, that margin could be changed.
He also adds that because the state Elections Division decided to expedite the write-in counting process, “my campaign team and I were forced to pull together volunteer observers at the last minute, and did not have time to adequately and fully recruit and train them before counting began. As a result, an indeterminate number of ballots with candidates’ names misspelled were counted without being challenged during the first several days of counting.”
Murkowski, who lost to Miller in the Republican primary, declared victory earlier this week after an unprecedented write-in campaign. And though the Alaska Republican Party has called for Miller to give up his fight, Miller contends that the race is a matter of “integrity.”
“We need to uphold the integrity of the vote and we need a consistent standard,” he said in a statement yesterday.
