LaFrance’s lead over Bronson narrows by 66 votes in race for city mayor

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - New numbers Wednesday showed a virtually unchanged race for Anchorage mayor.

The Department of Elections released new vote counts that show Mayor Dave Bronson with 27,404 votes, or 45.89%, and Suzanne LaFrance leading with 32,311 votes or 54.11% of the vote. LaFrance leads Bronson by 4,907 votes.

On election night, LaFrance held a 4,973 vote lead over Bronson, a change of only 66 votes.

Voting for Anchorage’s mayoral runoff election is over but Election Official William Northrop said it will be several days before election workers can catch up with all the ballots that came in Tuesday. Election workers did not have an exact number of how many ballots remained to be counted, but said the first time we would see in person voting numbers would be Thursday.

Speaking to Alaska’s News Source on Thursday, Bronson seemed to change his tune from his earlier statements made on election night, saying that the deficit will be difficult to overcome.

“Nothing’s impossible,” Bronson said. “It depends on who votes when, if the political right votes later — which we think we do ... but regardless, the numbers are tough to overcome at this point.”

Preliminary results from Tuesday night showed LaFrance with a little less than 5,000-vote lead over Bronson. But Bronson, who said Tuesday he was not discouraged by the gap, was pinning his hopes on high voter turnout in Eagle River — which he credits with helping him win his last runoff election by a narrow margin.

Election officials say voting trends have led them to expect higher turnout for this election. Compared to more than 72,000 votes seen during the April 2 general election, election officials expect 80,000 to 90,000 votes by the time all the counting ends on May 29.

Northrop said the 51,000 ballots counted as of Tuesday night included more than 7,000 from Eagle River. Northrop said there are about 1,400 more from that community to count.

On Wednesday morning, workers were still processing some votes that had come in Monday and said those would be included with election results released Wednesday evening. None of the ballots that came in Tuesday were included in Tuesday’s initial vote count and Northrop said it was likely Tuesday results would be included in Thursday’s count.

Election officials plan to release daily vote results throughout this week between 5:45 p.m. and 6 p.m., and possibly Monday, Wednesday and Friday of next week. They hope to be caught up with the backlog by Friday evening.

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