Well, if you don’t know who Ted Stevens is, I’m a little surprised. He’s the guy who wears his “Incredible Hulk” tie to the Senate floor when he is expecting to have to put up a fight to get a bill passed. Stevens is the brilliant mind who described the Internet as a series of tubes.

OH yeah, THAT Ted Stevens–ANYway, so he was recently convicted of corruption–a conviction he is appealing. In the meantime, there’s an election going on for his seat. Turns out, initially, he won. The catch? Ted Stevens, is now trailing his opponent, Anchorage Mayor, and Democrat, Mark Begich, by 814 points, according to an article at Reuters.com. But how did we go from disgraced-but-somehow-re-elected to losing by 800+ Alaskans?

Back on November 7, 2008, I linked to a post over at BradBlog.com called “SOMETHING SMELLS VERY FISHY IN ALASKA.” Here’s the excerpt from that article that I used in my post a week ago:

In Alaska, more people voted for George W. Bush in 2004 than for Sarah Palin on Tuesday despite an identical 61-36 margin of victory. Yes. Only four years ago 54,304 Alaskans got off their sofas and voted for Bush, but decided to sit home and not vote for Palin in 2008.

In turn, I have to ignore the 30,520 Alaskans who felt progressive enough in 2004 to vote for John Kerry, but weren’t inspired enough to get out and vote for Barack Obama.

Then, on October 10, BradBlog.com reported this:

Alaska Update: Thousands of Ballots ‘Found’, One-Third Remain Uncounted in the State’s Still-Fishy ‘08 Election
This just in from Alaska, where thousands of new ballots continue to be found each day, since it was first reported that turnout in 2008 was 11% lower than in 2004. Thousands of ballots, nearly a third of them, remain uncounted nearly a week after the election. Their numbers could explain the strange results so far in races — such as those of the felonious Sen. Ted Stevens (R) and the under-investigation Rep. Don Young (R) — for which pollsters had predicted decisive losses for the Republicans.
www.bradblog.com/?p=6654

Yeah, pretty neat, huh? Thousands of ballot turn up and they begin counting them. By last night, Keith Olbermann reported that Begich had inched ahead of Stevens by just three votes.

Yep:

It turns out, according to another post at BradBlog.com, 90,000 ballots were in the process of being counted after they were found days after the election.

And by today, Reuters reported Begich’s lead over Stevens had reached 814 votes.

Perhaps the people of Alaska aren’t as dumb as we were led to believe? Sure, they elected Palin governor, but they seem to have been smart enough to vote out a very recently convicted Stevens. Now, if we could only find out why 90,000 ballots were left uncounted as Stevens was being reported as the winner of that race.