Holmes should stand down in election spat

The ongoing dispute between Doyle Holmes and the Mat-Su Borough election officials is getting tiresome — literally.

The borough’s canvass board met for more than three hours on a recent weeknight to address Holmes’ complaint that the Oct. 6 election was handled improperly. A candidate for the District 7 assembly seat, Holmes came up 33 votes short and now seems to be doing whatever he can to delay his opponent, Randall Kowalke, from being sworn in.

It’s important to note that Holmes hasn’t asked for a recount, which would have to be done at his expense. Nor is he arguing — at least not overtly — that elections officials acted improperly. Instead, he’s using a backdoor tactic of asking for an investigation to delay the official results and, the speculation goes, lay the groundwork for a possible lawsuit.

Holmes’ only basis for his complaint is that a voting machine in Talkeetna had a small malfunction, which led to officials hand-delivering the ballots to another polling location on election night. The glitch caused results from that location to be delayed by a couple hours. There were no other irregularities in the election.

Borough officials have maintained scrupulous records of the election and appear to have followed all procedures down to the letter. Holmes’ only real beef is that the ballots were briefly in control of a single person, and it seems his contention is that this could have allowed someone to tamper with the results.

What he fails to acknowledge is that such tampering would require official seals to be broken, an act that would not only jeopardize the career of anyone who tried it, but also likely invite law enforcement involvement — tampering with elections is something the federal government doesn’t take lightly.

The Mat-Su Borough Assembly will meet on Tuesday to decide how to proceed. The assembly will get an opinion from attorney Nick Spirolopous before making its decision. It can either certify the election and swear Kowalke in, or ask for further study of the issue.

Exhaustive testimony on the part of borough elections staff has shown that nothing untoward happened in Talkeetna. Holmes himself can’t point to any ways in which the election results were biased, and he seems to be resting most of his challenge on what amounts to a minor technicality.

It would be in the best interest of both Holmes and the borough for him to drop his challenge and let the assembly move forward with its business. There’s a lot better ways for both parties to spend their time.