Miller seeks to stop election certification

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Republican U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller is now asking a federal judge to prevent the state Division of Elections from certifying the election results -- but can a victory in court overcome Sen. Lisa Murkowski's 10,000-vote lead?

The Miller campaign made its case in a series of federal court filings which were due Thursday.

All along, the state has said voter intent is what matters in determining whether write-in ballots were cast for Murkowski, but Miller says the standard the state is using to count the ballots violates the U.S. Constitution.

Miller also argued that when the state moved up the date for ballot counting by a week, it forced Miller to quickly gather a ballot-observing team that he says couldn't be properly trained -- costing him opportunities to challenge Murkowski ballots.

“An indeterminate number of ballots with candidate names misspelled were counted without being challenged during the first several days of counting,” Miller said in the documents.

Meanwhile, the Miller campaign says it began its audit of voter rolls Thursday to check for alleged cases of voter fraud.

The Division of Elections says it just completed its annual mandatory hand-count of 5 percent of the election results, and that the results prove that ballot-counting machines provided accurate results.

Contact Jason Lamb at jlamb@ktuu.com