Lieberman wins; Stevens loses

Mark Begich was finally declared the winner in Alaska's Senate race, defeating incumbent and rat bastard Ted Stevens. Also, after absentee ballots and early votes were counted, the turnout in Alaska actually turned out to be quite high. There's still no explanation for why the polling was so wrong in Alaska, but nowhere else.

Also in the Senate, Democrats voted 42 to 13 to allow Joe Lieberman to retain his chairmanship of the Committee on Homeland Security. Sure, allowing Lieberman to stay is a great bipartisan move. It also rewards him for his committee's complete lack of oversight on homeland security.



I guess making out with John McCain was punishment enough.

Counting continues in Alaska

As the vote count continues in Alaska, at least a few people are asking about the low turnout. The answers aren't convincing:

According to the Division of Election's projections, the election will end up drawing the second most voters in an Alaska presidential election, next to 2004, but far from the blockbuster numbers you might expect in an election that saw Stevens found guilty in a federal court just days before the voting and Gov. Sarah Palin running for vice president.

Pundits at home and across the country said the turnout numbers smelled fishy. Fenumiai said Monday that there's no evidence of fraud or irregularities.

"I can't speculate as to why people just didn't show up to vote," she said.

Also, the Washington Post is reporting that Mark Begich has taken a three-vote lead over Ted Stevens.

Voting oddities

From last Wednesday, Nate Silver from Five ThirtyEight details some voting strangeness in Alaska:

So far, about 220 thousand votes have been processed in Alaska. This compares with 313 thousand votes cast in 2004. After adding back in the roughly 50,000 absentee and early ballots that Roll Call accounts for, that would get us to 270 thousand ballots, or about a 14 percent drop from 2004. It seems unlikely that turnout would drop by 14 percent in Alaska given the presence of both a high-profile senate race and Sarah Palin at the top of the ticket.

But even if Begich were to make up ground and win a narrow victory, this would seem to represent a catastrophic failure of polling, as three polls conducted following the guilty verdict in Stevens' corruption trial had Begich leading by margins of 7, 8 and 22 points, respectively.

The emerging conventional wisdom is that there was some sort of a Bradley Effect in this contest -- voters told pollsters that they weren't about to vote for that rascal Ted Stevens, when in fact they were perfectly happy to. Convicted felons are the new black, it would seem.

The problem with this theory is that the polling failures in Alaska weren't unique to Stevens. They also applied to the presidential race, as well as Alaska's at-large House seat. In each case, the Republican outperformed his pre-election polling by margins ranging from 12 to 14 points.

So what the hell did happen in Alaska?

Linda Kellen Biegel explains why it's premature to jump to the conclusion that some kind of fraud is involved.