Sen. Lisa Murkowski is seen in a photo provided by her campaign.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski is seen in a photo provided by her campaign. A judge may make a decision as early as Friday on the challenge to Murkowski's apparently successful write-in campaign for re-election to the Senate. Murkowski campaign

Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski is the projected winner of her tight race for the Senate against challenger and tea-party-backed Republican Joe Miller.

The victory for Murkowski would be historic, as she would become the first write-in candidate to win a seat in the Senate in 56 years.

After a week of counting hand-written ballots, officials said Wednesday that they had only about 700 votes left to count, according to the Associated Press.

Murkowski had a lead of about 10,000 votes as of Wednesday, including 8,153 ballots which her opponent Joe Miller had contested over misspellings, legibility or extra words.

Neither Miller nor Murkowski has so far issued a statement regarding the projection.

Miller said earlier this week that he did not intend to fight over ballots if the math didn't add up in his favor.

Murkowski was defeated by Miller in the Republican primary. However she decided to mount a write-in campaign.

The Division of Elections had previously said it expected the write-in process to wrap up Wednesday.

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