Merrill skeptical outstanding ballots will alter Alabama Senate result

The day after a historic election in the state of Alabama, the runner-up’s acceptance or rejection of the result was an open question. 

The campaign of Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore, who strongly suggested Tuesday he would seek a recount after losing the U.S. Senate election to Democratic Senate nominee Doug Jones, did not respond to questions Wednesday.

Moore did appear in a video released by the campaign late Wednesday, in which he signaled that he would not concede, even as Republicans at the federal and state level appeared to accept the result.

"This has been a very close race, and we are awaiting certification from the Secretary of State," Moore said in the video, which most served as a speech hitting his usual themes of putting religion in the public square, along with attacks on "abortion, sodomy and materialism." 

Secretary of State John Merrill said they had not gotten any official signals from the Moore camp about a recount. 

Tuesday evening Moore campaign chairman Bill Armistead suggested they would look for a boost from provisional or military ballots. 

“A lot of votes are in, but they’re not all in yet,” he told supporters Tuesday. “There’s a law in Alabama that requires a recount if the vote is one half of one percent.”

In unofficial returns Wednesday, Jones had received 671,151 votes, 49.92 percent of the total. Moore had received 650,436 votes, or about 48.38 percent of the vote. Jones’ 1.5 percent margin of victory is higher than the 0.5 percent margin required to trigger a recount. 

Merrill on Wednesday expressed skepticism that ballot returns would alter the result.

“I don’t know how many ballots are going to be returned from overseas voters or how many provisional ballots there are, but I’m confident not all of them are going to be for one candidate,” he said. 

It was not immediately clear Wednesday if Moore could request a recount at the current margins. State law allows candidates to challenge recounts outside the automatic trigger if they are willing to pay the costs. Merrill suggested in interviews that that could be an option — albeit an expensive one — for Moore. But election law expert Rick Hasen noted in a post late Tuesday that the law only appears to cover statewide offices, not federal ones. 

Asked about this Wednesday, Merrill said “if we need advice or counsel on this matter, we’ll be seeking it from attorneys and judges in the state of Alabama, not attorneys and judges in the state of California.” 

More than 1.3 million ballots were cast in the special election, a 40 percent turnout that blasted through earlier estimates of 25 percent. Nearly 23,000 write-in ballots — more than Jones' unofficial margin — were also cast. 

“We’ve never had a special election like this,” Merrill said. "This is a record for this kind of special election.”