Miller Drops Challenge to Alaska Senate Election

(CN) - Republican Joe Miller will reportedly stop challenging the U.S. Senate race in Alaska, in which the incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski mounted a write-in campaign to claim victory, after the Alaska Supreme Court rejected his claims.

Miller had appealed to the state supreme court after a superior court judge upheld the Alaska election division's actions.

"There are no remaining issues raised by Miller that prevent this election from being certified," the Alaska Supreme Court judges wrote in an unsigned opinion.

Miller has said he will stop contesting the election but would not congratulate Murkowski, who is also a Republican, according to media reports.

Among Miller's challenges to the election results, he said write-in votes that misspell Murkowski's name should not have been counted.

"We do not interpret the statute to require perfection in the manner that the candidate's name is written on the ballot," the opinion states. "Our prior decisions clearly hold that a voter's intention is paramount."

The provisions for write-in votes are designed to ensure that ballots are counted, not excluded, according to the ruling.

The judges wrote that Miller's interpretation of the statute "would erode the integrity of the election system," disenfranchise some voters and ultimately reject "election results that constitute the will of the people."

Miller had also challenged the election division's procedure to manually count the write-in votes, but the judges rejected those claims as well.

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