With absentee and provisional ballots being counted now in Alaska, at one point today Mark Begich was exactly three votes ahead of Ted Stevens in the race for Senate. That’s three (3) votes out of more than a quarter million.
But, a check at the Alaska Secretary of State — the place to go for up-to-the-minute election return information from The Last Frontier — reveals the following:
| Mark Begich | Democrat | 132,196 | 47.41% |
| Bob Bird | Alaska Independence | 11,315 | 4.06% |
| Ted Gianoutsos | N/A | 1,140 | 0.41% |
| Fredrick Haase | Libertarian | 2,086 | 0.75% |
| Ted Stevens | Republican | 131,382 | 47.12% |
Now, that’s a nearly 800 vote lead for Begich. I would still submit that 800 votes out of 278,837 nevertheless represents a large amount of marginal power for a voter to exercise. No Reader, anywhere, should fail to exercise their franchise after seeing this powerful object lesson in democracy.
