The newspaper adds that, "elections workers opened the write-in ballots for almost 20 percent of the precincts in Alaska on Wednesday. The count of more than 90,000 write-ins will continue today and is expected to last five days."
Stevens was declared the loser in Alaska on Tuesday night after a two-week-long process of counting nearly 90,000 absentee and early votes from across Alaska.
Maybe Alaska has always been a bit different.
From 2010:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/11/11/131240596/alaska-vote-count-murkowski-got-98-of-initial-write-ins
This from 2008:
https://www.politico.com/story/2008/11/58-and-counting-stevens-gets-the-boot-015754