Murkowski on the Verge of Victory?

The Alaska Division of Elections is still sorting though write-in ballots, and it appears Sen. Lisa Murkowski will likely win re-election after all.

Tuesday is the final scheduled day of counting for questioned ballots, and Murkowski leads by more than 1,700. The Anchorage Daily News reports:

The Division of Elections has now counted 92,164 votes for Murkowski and 90,458 for Miller. Murkowski's number will grow as the state continues to go through write-in ballots today, looking to see what name voters wrote on them.

More than 8,000 write-in ballots remain to be looked at. The trend since counting began last week has been for the Division of Elections to count more than 97 percent of them for Murkowski.

Miller has launched a court case that could affect the outcome, asking the state to adhere to the letter of its election law, which requires that candidates' names be spelled correctly on write-in ballots.

Election officials, who had said they would count write-in ballots using a standard of "voter intent"--meaning that slight misspellings of Murkowski's name would count in her favor--and the question will be whether or not there are enough slight misspellings in Murkowski's total for Miller's court case to be able to affect the final outcome.