Florida Counts Millions of Votes in a Few Hours. DeSantis Asks Why Alaska Is Still Counting.

Ron DeSantis asked the question a lot of Americans have been asking all week, and he asked it in two sentences.

The Florida governor posted it Wednesday morning, quoting a TV station’s update on Alaska’s U.S. Senate race. By the evening it had been seen more than 100,000 times. Eight days after polls closed, Alaska still has no winner in the race between Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan and Democrat Mary Peltola, and the state won’t even run its official ranked-choice count until next week.

DeSantis didn’t need to spell out the comparison. Florida has more than 20 times Alaska’s population, and it tells voters who won on election night. Alaska, with fewer people than Jacksonville, is still adding ballots.

How Florida gets it done in one night

Florida’s speed isn’t luck. It is written into state law.

Under Florida Statute 101.68, county canvassing boards can start processing mail ballots weeks before Election Day, as soon as they finish public testing of the counting machines. They check signatures, open envelopes and run ballots through the scanners ahead of time. The one thing they cannot do is release a result early. Leaking a number before the polls close is a third-degree felony.

Then the law sets a clock. By 7 p.m. the night before the election, every county supervisor has to load the early-vote and mail-ballot totals already counted into the county’s system. Within 30 minutes of the polls closing, those results go to the state, according to Statute 102.141. After that, updated precinct results have to be sent at least every 45 minutes until everything is in. Supervisors also have to post, every hour while they are counting, how many mail ballots came in and how many are left.

Florida also wants mail ballots in hand by the time polls close on Election Day, with a narrow exception for overseas voters. That means there is no pile of late-arriving envelopes to wait on. When Floridians go to bed, the vast majority of the vote is already counted.

Why Alaska is still at it

Alaska runs on a very different set of rules, and nearly every one of them adds days.

First, the mail deadline. A ballot mailed from inside the country counts as long as it is postmarked by Election Day and arrives within 10 days, which this year is Friday, the Alaska Beacon reported. Ballots from overseas voters can arrive as late as 15 days after the election, which makes Nov. 18 the final day, The Associated Press reported.

Second, ranked-choice voting. Alaskans rank up to four candidates. If nobody tops 50% of the first-choice votes, the last-place finisher is dropped and those ballots move to their next choice, round after round, until two are left. The state’s Division of Elections says ranked-choice results “will not be available until November 18, 2026 once all eligible ballots are reviewed and counted.” Neither Senate candidate has hit 50%.

Third, the map. Some ballots come from villages off the road system, and in some rural precincts ballots are first counted by hand. The Alaska Beacon reported that 9,909 of those hand-counted rural ballots are not yet in the ranking data the state has published.

As of Tuesday night, the state had counted 245,470 first-choice ballots in the Senate race, according to the Alaska Beacon. The AP estimated about 84% of all votes were in. Peltola led by 4,250 first-choice votes, 48.8% to 47.1%, with a significant update expected after Friday’s deadline.

Sullivan’s campaign isn’t conceding a thing. Spokesman Nate Adams said there are still tens of thousands of ballots to count and “a long way to go before every Alaskan’s voice is heard,” Alaska Public Media reported.

A third Sullivan on the ballot

The slow count isn’t the only reason Republicans are watching Alaska closely. A retired educator from Petersburg named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. was also on the Senate ballot. The senator and his allies say Democrats recruited him to confuse voters, and Alaska Public Media reported that the Trump administration has sued to block certification if the incumbent loses but would have won had the Petersburg Sullivan’s votes gone to him. As it stands, that Petersburg Sullivan has about 4,000 votes, close to the gap between the two front-runners.

Peltola’s campaign has its own fight in court. An Alaska judge turned down its demand for the names of voters whose absentee ballots were rejected, calling the request “not reasonable,” the AP reported.

The case DeSantis is really making

Plenty of people pushed back on DeSantis in the replies, pointing to Alaska’s size, its remote villages and ballots that have to be flown in. At least one blamed ranked-choice voting more than geography, saying counts didn’t used to drag on this long.

That is close to the point. Alaska chose most of the things that slow it down: late-arriving mail ballots and a multi-round ranked-choice system that can’t be finished until the last envelope shows up. Florida chose the opposite. It counts early, sets hard deadlines and makes counties report on a schedule.

For voters, the difference is trust. A result that shows up the same night, with ballot counts posted every hour, gives people less room to wonder what happened in the dark. A result that trickles out for two weeks, with the lead shifting and a final tally run by software days later, gives them a lot more.

DeSantis has spent years selling Florida’s system as the model for the country. This week, Alaska made his case for him.