Nearly 600 voters turned out in Dillingham yesterday to cast their ballots in person for the General Election.
While preliminary results from day-of in-person voting are available, final results will hinge on mail-in or in-person absentee ballots, and questioned or special needs ballots.
Dillingham voters cast 256 early in-person absentee ballots, 43 questioned ballots, and 6 special needs ballots. These votes will be counted in the coming weeks.
In the partial, unofficial results, the lean of Dillingham voters, in many cases, ran counter to state and national trends.
For the presidential election in Dillingham, Democrat Kamala Harris holds a narrow lead over Republican Donald Trump, with 266 votes to Trump’s 253. 23 votes went to third-party candidates.
Incumbents in other key races are also in the lead in Dillingham.
In Alaska’s U.S. House race, incumbent Democrat Mary Peltola has 329 votes, leading Republican Nick Begich III, who received 192 votes. Democratic candidate Eric Hafner and Alaska Independence Party candidate John Wayne Howe collectively secured about 4% of the vote.
In District 37 overall, which includes Bristol Bay, the Alaska Peninsula and parts of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, Peltola holds a slight lead with roughly 51 percent of the vote. However, statewide, she trails Begich by about 11,000 votes. That's according to the Division of Elections’ most recent count early Wednesday morning.
For the House District 37 seat, incumbent independent Bryce Edgmon leads challenger Darren Deacon, also an independent, by more than 3 to 1.
The unofficial results for District 37 overall show Edgmon with a slightly less lopsided lead, with about 75 of the votes.
Dillingham voters supported Ballot Measure 1, which proposes an increase to Alaska’s minimum wage and mandates at least one week of paid sick leave. The measure received 368 "yes" votes and 137 "no" votes.
Voters largely opposed Ballot Measure 2, which seeks to repeal ranked choice voting and open primaries. The “no” votes to keep the current system stand at 329 votes, while 187 voted “yes” to return to single-choice voting and closed primaries.
The “no” vote on Ballot Measure 2 is leading in District 37 by more than 10 percentage points, but statewide is behind the “yes” vote by 2 percentage points.
Marilyn Rosene, a poll worker at the Dillingham voting location, said Election Day in Dillingham went smoothly, in part because they were staffed with a sufficient number of volunteers. She says at one point as many as 11 people were working the polls.
“We had adequate coverage for the amount of energy that was coming into here,” said Rosene. “We knew that there would be a lot of questions and clarifications. And there were.”
Rosene said the wait was never more than 5 minutes but the location was busy and turnout was high.
“We had several people of many different ages who came in and voted for the very first time,” said Rosene. “We had brand new 18-year-olds and we had people at different stages of life.
Rosene is also a voter registrar and she registered 10 new voters on Election Day. Alaska law allows same-day voter registration for the purposes of voting in the presidential election.
Absentee and mail-in ballots will be counted over the coming weeks, with ballots from within the U.S. tallied by Nov. 15 and those from abroad by Nov. 20.
