Democrat Mary Peltola has won the special election for Alaska’s only seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
She beat a field that included Republican Sarah Palin who was seeking a political comeback in the state where she was once governor.
The election was held on August 16th, but the results were not released until Wednesday, August 31 because absentee ballots from outside the U.S. were still being counted.
It was Alaska’s first statewide election using ranked choice voting where voters rank candidates by their first or second choice, and so on, for all four candidates.
That result is used if none of the candidates gets more than 50 percent of the vote.
After Peltola’s victory was announced, Palin, a former Republican vice presidential candidate, called her state’s ranked voting system “crazy, convoluted, confusing.”
Back in June, Palin had finished at the top of a field of 48 other candidates in the special congressional primary for the state’s only U.S. House seat.
The top four vote-getters from that June primary, regardless of party affiliation, had advanced to the August special election in which the unusual ranked-choice voting process was used.
Peltola will serve the remaining months of the term of the late Republican Congressman Don Young. He held the seat for 49 years before his death in March.
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