Alaska Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom said Monday that she intends to recount a narrowly defeated ballot initiative to repeal ranked choice voting and open primaries. After a final ballot count last week, Ballot Measure 2 was defeated 49.

A final ballot count by Alaska’s election workers on Wednesday cemented the narrow lead for supporters of Alaska’s ranked choice voting and open primary system, who sought to defeat a ballot measure that would have done away with the state’s new voting process.

By the narrowest of margins, Alaska will keep its ranked choice voting (RCV) system. In 2020, Alaskan voters passed Ballot Measure 2, which replaced the state's traditional voting system with RCV. The measure passed narrowly,

More than two weeks after the Nov. 5 election, final unofficial results show Ballot Measure 2 in Alaska, the repeal of ranked-choice voting and open primaries, has been rejected by

Congresswoman Mary Peltola, a Democrat, trails with 46.3%. The Division of Elections will tabulate ranked choices on Wednesday, but those ballots may not help her. A conservative Alaskan Independence Party candidate, John Wayne Howe, has about 4% of the vote, quadruple the share received by federal inmate Eric Hafner, who filed as a Democrat.

The narrow vote to keep RCV in Alaska is great news for Lisa Murkowski but didn’t save Mary Peltola. Meanwhile, RCV lost in five other states.

A day after the votes for keeping Alaska’s open primary and ranked choice voting system overtook those to repeal it, the vote count tightened on Tuesday. The votes against the ballot measure to repeal the system are only 45 votes ahead of those in favor of repeal,

Ballot Measure 2 — which would have repealed the state’s system of ranked choice voting and open primaries — failed by 0.2%, or 664 votes. The Alaska GOP wants a review of the result.