Keeping our fingers crossed in Alaska.

Although Ted Stevens currently holds a lead of approximately 3,200 votes in ballots counted to date in Alaska's senate contest, there is good reason to believe that the ballots yet to be counted -- the vast majority of which are early and absentee ballots -- will allow Mark Begich to mitigate his disadvantage with Stevens and quite possibly pull ahead of him.

The reasoning behind this is simple: some early ballots have been processed, and among those ballots Begich substantially leads Stevens. A tally of Alaska's 40 house districts as taken from Alaska's Division of Elections webpage suggests that Begich has won about 61% of the early ballots counted so far, as compared with 48% of ballots cast on Election Day itself.

So though I am still very concerned about possible voting irregularities I am very encouraged that there are sill a number of uncounted votes which may very well break in Mark Begich's favor.

But there are questions which are still plaguing me. Why, after three days have the EARLY votes still not been counted? And why do the number of uncounted votes keep rising? (A few days ago it was around 74,000 and then it suddenly shot up to 81,000. Is that from an increase in absentee votes? Because that seems very odd.)

So my tinfoil hat has been placed carefully on the desk next to my computer, but I also have some information that this thing is about to blow up in a big way and if that happens then my shiny hat and I may have a much different take in the very near future.

Stay tuned kids.