Alaska's Senate race waits on planes hauling ballots to Juneau

Alaska's Senate race is still uncalled, days after the rest of the country finished voting. Officials expect to have counted every eligible ballot by 18 November, leaving the contest between incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan and Democratic former Congresswoman Mary Peltola in limbo. Alaska is also waiting on results for governor and its US House seat. The delay comes after Democrats won back both chambers of Congress from the Republicans.

The holdup is geography. Alaska is more than six times the size of the UK, and it is stitched together mainly by water and air rather than roads. That makes Alaska Seaplanes part of the supply chain. The regional carrier, which serves the state's southeast, has been flying ballots alongside its usual cargo of passengers, medicine and supplies. Andy Kline, the airline's marketing director, told the BBC he and his colleagues feel the weight of the task: 'We all feel like we have skin in the game to make sure that our elections are accurate and timely.'

Mail ballots stretch the timeline further. Charles Stewart III, an election expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says they can arrive up to 10 days after election day, or 15 days for overseas voters, as long as they were postmarked by election day. Stewart says officials chose to take their time rather than rush the second and third batches of ballots into the count. Whether votes were cast in person or by mail, they all end up in the state capital of Juneau, reachable only by plane or boat, for scanning and counting.

Remote precincts add their own quirks. Scott Kendall, an election lawyer who has worked on two campaigns for Alaska's other Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, says in some places a single person is effectively running the election for their family and neighbours because the village is so small. Ballots there are sealed in special envelopes or containers, sent through the mail and loaded onto planes headed for Juneau, Kline said, calling them 'just another couple of boxes'. Kline said the airline takes pride in 'the really complicated job of getting all these ballots across thousands of miles in Alaska'.

Once everything is in Juneau, officials finish their review. If no candidate clears 50% of the vote in the first round, they will move quickly to ranked-choice voting, reallocating votes from the lowest-scoring candidates to those voters' second choices. Only then will Alaska declare winners in the Senate race, the governor's race and the US House contest.

The Senate race has picked up an extra layer of noise. A second Republican named Dan Sullivan, who was allegedly recruited by Democratic operatives, raised the question of whether he could affect the outcome, though results released so far suggest a low probability. This week President Donald Trump alleged the election had been 'rigged' because of the second Dan's involvement, and his administration is appealing its failed lawsuit to halt certification of the election, which a lower court dismissed. Separately, a judge denied an attempt by Peltola's campaign to learn how many absentee ballots were rejected and who those voters were, with the state arguing it had no obligation to share the data and that doing so would violate voter privacy.