Alaska Judge Rejects Mary Peltola's Bid For Rejected Ballot Records In Senate Race

An Alaska judge on Wednesday rejected Democrat Mary Peltola's request for the names of voters whose absentee ballots were rejected, handing her campaign a courtroom loss in the country's last uncalled Senate race.

Peltola is challenging Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, a two-term incumbent, in a race that is still too early to call as election officials keep counting ballots.

Her campaign sued state officials Friday, seeking the voters' names and the reasons the Division of Elections rejected their ballots. Its attorneys said the records would help make sure every qualified voter had their ballot counted in the Senate contest.

Alaska Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews called the request "not reasonable" given the work still facing election officials as they count last week's ballots.

READ MORE: Mary Peltola Sues Alaska for Absentee Voter Records as Senate Race Stays Uncalled

"The timing of the Campaign's request could simply not be worse," Matthews wrote.

'Cannot Reasonably Be Produced'

Matthews said the information might be releasable "in theory" if officials could pull it from the database and redact it. But he concluded the records "cannot reasonably be produced at this juncture, nor redacted of confidential information."

He described running elections as the division's "fundamental responsibility" as he weighed the request against the agency's workload. The division told the court its employees were already working long hours to meet the deadlines for administering the election.

State attorneys argued the request raised privacy concerns and would pull staff away from counting ballots. They said generating a list from the voter database would amount to creating an "electronic service or product," and that state law lets the agency give its primary responsibilities priority over producing that kind of report.

They also called the reports "ephemeral working documents that are not meant for preservation" and said they contained confidential information.

The Campaign's Argument

Peltola campaign attorney Abha Khanna told Matthews on Tuesday that the campaign had no intention of disrupting the ongoing count. She described the absentee review as going "incredibly smoothly" and argued the requested information was a matter of public record.

READ MORE: BREAKING: NEW BALLOT DUMP SHIFTS CRUCIAL REMAINING SENATE RACE

Khanna said campaign observers could already see similar information at the locations where absentee review boards were meeting. She said the campaign wanted a centralized way to access it during the review, without relying on individual locations.

Michaela Thompson, who oversees the division's absentee ballot review boards, explained in an affidavit that the reports shown to observers contain less confidential information than the versions officials use for their own work. Even those observer versions include home addresses that many voters want to keep private, she told the court.

Observers sign confidentiality agreements before reviewing the reports and cannot keep copies or write down what they see. Those rules apply to campaign observers as well as anyone else allowed to view the reports.

Thompson described the database as "old, inflexible" and said it cannot produce a report that leaves out confidential addresses. The division would need to work with a vendor to build a report tailored to the campaign's request.

Requests for comment from a firm representing Peltola's campaign and from the state Department of Law went unanswered Wednesday, a holiday.

Alaska accepts overseas ballots for 15 days after the election, giving them until November 18 to arrive. The Division of Elections is also targeting November 18 for ranked-choice tabulation if no candidate clears 50% of the first-choice vote, NBC News reported.