First Election Day Tapes from two statistically significant Anchorage precincts put Kreiss-Tomkins and Begich ahead of the field

Two Anchorage polling places recorded Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins and Tom Begich well ahead of the rest of the 17-ticket governor field on Tuesday, according to tabulator receipts provided to Alaska News. The result is not a projection. It covers 1,180 votes from two Election Day tabulators, and the two leaders are four votes apart across both.

Early, absentee, questioned and some other ballots are counted separately and are not fully reflected in the polling-place receipts.

In 10-165 Oceanview No. 3, Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins and Zac Johnson led the governor and lieutenant governor field with 130 votes, or 22.5% of the 579 votes cast in the governor race on that tabulator. Tom Begich and Julia Hnilicka followed with 113 votes, or 19.5%. Dave Bronson and Josh Church had 91 votes, Bernadette Wilson and Michael Shower had 73, and Treg Taylor and Candi English had 39.

In 13-315 South Midtown No. 3, the top two reversed. Begich and Hnilicka led with 150 votes, or 25.0% of the 601 votes cast in the governor race. Kreiss-Tomkins and Johnson followed with 137 votes, or 22.8%. Bronson and Church had 74 votes, Wilson and Shower had 54, and Taylor and English had 53.

Kreiss-Tomkins and Johnson led the combined two-precinct count by four votes, 267 to 263, over Begich and Hnilicka. Four votes is about a third of one percent of the 1,180 cast, so the order between them means little.

The figures above account for 446 of the 579 votes in Oceanview and 468 of the 601 in South Midtown. The remaining votes, about 23% in each precinct, went to the 12 tickets not listed here, so this article does not report where any ticket placed below the top two.

The comparison has a further limitation. Alaska centrally counts early, absentee in-person, by-mail, electronic-transmission and questioned ballots by House district or other reporting categories. Those votes are not all assigned back to the named Election Day precinct on the receipt.

The two precincts were chosen because an Alaska News analysis of 12 statewide contests in 2022 and 2024 found they tracked the statewide result closely. Oceanview No. 3 averaged 3.16 percentage points of distance from the statewide result, while South Midtown No. 3 averaged 3.76 points. Each picked the same leading candidate or option as the state in 11 of the 12 contests. Whether that holds in a 17-ticket primary, where the leading share here is under a quarter of the vote, has not been tested.

This account rests on two tabulator receipts provided to Alaska News, whose source is not identified here, and on our own earlier analysis. The figures have not been checked against the Division of Elections count.