Justice Department Deploys 300 Ballot-Counters to Alaska, Orders Them to Stand in Front of the Results Until Sullivan Wins
Federal officials have dispatched a hand-picked team of ballot-counters to Anchorage with instructions to physically occupy the counting room and refuse to let any tallies leave until the Republican incumbent is declared the winner.
The Justice Department has flown a hand-picked team of three hundred ballot-counters into Anchorage and ordered them to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the state's election results until Senator Dan Sullivan is declared the winner, officials confirmed Friday.
The counters, recruited from federal offices across the lower forty-eight and issued matching windbreakers reading «RESULTS REVIEW TEAM,» arrived on a chartered cargo plane at dawn and were bused directly to the Alaska Division of Elections, where they formed a human wall between the public and the tally boards. A department spokesman said the team would remain in place «for as long as it takes the numbers to become correct.»
By midday the counters had begun reading the vote totals aloud in shifts, rotating every twenty minutes so that the recitation never stops, and a second wave was reportedly being trained in Seattle to relieve them. Local election workers, unable to reach their own desks, have set up a folding table in the parking lot and are counting ballots by headlamp.
«We are not blocking anything,» the spokesman said. «We are simply standing here, very close together, in a way that happens to prevent the wrong result from being seen.» He added that the team had brought its own folding chairs and a schedule for sleeping in the corridor.
Governor Mike Dunleavy has offered the counters the use of the state fairgrounds for overflow standing, and the National Guard has been asked to deliver cots. The department says the operation will expand to any state where a Republican might lose, with teams already practicing their wall formation in a hangar in Virginia.
1