Alaska 2022 primary election results

Alaska voters on Tuesday cast ballots in primaries for the Senate, House, governor and state legislature.

There was also a special ranked-choice general election to serve the remaining term for the late Republican Rep. Don Young, who died in March.

Polls closed by 1 a.m. ET on Wednesday. (Alaska spans two time zones).

The new nonpartisan primary voting system had only one ballot, with all candidates -- regardless of party affiliation -- included and the top four advancing.

State Significance

As reported by ABC News' Hannah Demissie, Alaska implemented a top-four primary system and ranked-choice general election system this year, a move which voters approved in 2020.

In the ranked-choice process for the general election, if a candidate wins more than 50% of the first-place vote, they win outright. If no candidate crosses that threshold, the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated and that candidate's voters instead have their ballots redistributed to their second choice.

Supporters hope that ranked-choice will lead to less polarized elections by requiring candidates to appeal to the largest number of voters as either their first or second choice; however, the system is also more complicated than traditional first-past-the-post elections and will take longer to count.

Three candidates sought to temporarily fill Rep. Young's seat in the special election Tuesday.

According to the FiveThirtyEight polling aggregate, Democrat Mary Peltola, a former Alaska state representative, holds her own against former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who is backed by former President Donald Trump, and Republican Nicholas Begich III.

The three are also the front-runners of the regular House primary, also held on Tuesday, in which 22 candidates vied to be among the top four winners to advance to the general election in November to serve a full two-year term in the House.

Meanwhile Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski -- who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial -- faced her first major challenge in years, from the Trump-endorsed Kelly Tshibaka. Murkowski was widely expected to advance from the primaries as one of the four nominees, but polling collected by FiveThirtyEight shows that the race between Tshibaka and Murkowski was tight.

Murkowski is no stranger to unlikely victories, though: She lost her primary in 2010 to a tea party challenger but won the general election in an unusually successful write-in campaign that drew more than 100,000 votes.