Alaska Public Media: Here's why Alaska is the slowest in the nation when it comes to vote counting

Questions, confusion and speculation about Alaska’s vote-counting process have erupted as state officials wait to count more than 100,000 absentee and other ballots until next week — long after other U.S. states count the vast majority of their votes.

Alaska won’t start tallying its remaining ballots — at least 40% of the total — until Tuesday at the earliest, making the state stand out as a gray island in the ubiquitous red and blue electoral vote maps used by national outlets.

It’s the only one to have counted less than 60% of its votes, according to figures collected by The New York Times.
The timeline is one that Alaska has used before. But in past years, the absentee vote count has typically been an afterthought that affects only the closest of races.

This year’s massive, pandemic-driven absentee turnout has changed that.

State officials said the wait stems from Alaska’s huge size and complicated logistics: It has polling places in dozens of villages with no road access. Officials said they also need the extra week to finish the time-consuming process of logging the names of each Alaskan who voted on Election Day, then cross-referencing with absentee ballots to make sure no one’s votes are counted twice.


https://www.alaskapublic.org/2020/11/05/every-state-except-alaska-has-counted-more-than-60-of-its-votes-heres-why