The Controversial Alaska Senate Race Remains Undecided. Both Campaigns Are Optimistic.

The Alaska Senate race between incumbent Republican Senator Dan S Sullivan and Democrat challenger Mary Peltola is still too close to call with nearly three quarters of votes counted.

Sullivan currently leads Peltola by a razor-thin margin of just over 1500 votes with 72% of ballots counted, according to AP. Despite the narrowness of the lead, the Sullivan campaign is optimistic about a GOP victory on what has otherwise been a very difficult day for the party in power.

"I'm confident [that] when all the votes are counted, I will have the honor of representing you in the United States Senate again for six more years," Sullivan told supporters. Peltola too is optimistic. "We are winning our state back," she said to her backers. However, she warned that it would take a long time before all the votes in the remote "hinterlands" of the non-contiguous state are counted.

A Republican win in the race would not change the national picture significantly, as a string of Democrat victories in Republican strongholds has meant that the party of opposition will control the Senate in addition to the House.

However, the outcome of the race is being watched closely as the election has been the subject of a high-profile controversy relating to the presence of another candidate on the ballot whose name is nearly identical to that of the incumbent Republican Senator.

Daniel J Sullivan is running for the Alaskan Senate seat as an independent, but Republicans have accused Democrats of conspiring to persuade him to run in the race in the hope that Republican Alaskan voters would confuse his name with that of the Republican candidate Dan S Sullivan and thus vote for the wrong candidate, or at the very least misrank their preferred candidate, in Alaska's ranked-choice ballot.

A report by the New York Times seemed to corroborate the Republicans' accusations, as the Times claimed that Peltola's team both "work[ed] with people trying to recruit Mr. Sullivan to run for Senate" and "worked to coax other would-be spoilers into the race, to dilute the incumbent's support and help catapult the Democrat to victory."

Both Peltola's campaign and Peltola herself deny knowledge of any such scheme, and a federal judge has dismissed an unprecedented federal lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to block the certification of the results of the Alaska Senate race in the case of a Peltola victory.

Blocking certification would supposedly have allowed time for an investigation into a potential intentional attempt to mislead voters to take place.

However, the judge who tossed the lawsuit said that the federal government had not outlined a realistic way to address the issue they raised, and also cited concerns about the government potentially violating ballot secrecy in an effort to investigate voters' intent.

On the ballot itself, the two candidates appeared as Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican) Incumbent and Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr.