President Trump said Friday he personally ordered the Justice Department to sue to block certification of Alaska's U.S. Senate election results if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses, an extraordinary intervention that voting-rights experts labeled unprecedented with control of the chamber potentially hanging on the outcome.
"I'm the one that said do it," Trump told reporters as he landed in Florida for a campaign rally Friday. The lawsuit, filed less than two weeks before Election Day, centers on an unusual quirk of the Alaska ballot: a second candidate, retired schoolteacher Daniel J. Sullivan, is also running as a Republican and will appear alongside the incumbent senator on the November ballot.
A Dead Heat With an Odd Twist
Polls show Senator Dan S. Sullivan locked in a close race against Democratic challenger Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman, with control of the U.S. Senate potentially resting on the result. The Justice Department's complaint argues that "the sole purpose" of the second Sullivan's candidacy is to "benefit the Peltola campaign by reducing the number of votes" meant for the incumbent, and claims a resulting certification "will reflect an electoral process that lacked integrity." The administration is asking a court to pause certification of the vote pending an investigation into which ballots cast for the second Sullivan were actually intended for the senator.
Legal scholars were blunt in dismissing the theory. "The legal claim is so absurdly thin, there's essentially no likelihood of success," Derek Mueller, a election-law professor at the University of Notre Dame, wrote in a blog post responding to the filing. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, went further, calling the lawsuit "an unprecedented intervention by the federal government" into a state's own ballot-counting process.
Part of a Wider Pattern
The Alaska suit lands amid a broader wave of Justice Department activity around the midterms, including a separate push in California, where federal prosecutors sent letters this week to county registrars across the state demanding they set aside and verify ballots the department suspects belong to noncitizens. Data on illegal voting by noncitizens has consistently shown it to be exceedingly rare and has never been shown to swing a race's outcome, but the administration has made challenging ballot integrity in Democratic-leaning jurisdictions a centerpiece of its midterm strategy.
Alaska election officials have not indicated any change to their certification timeline, and legal observers expect the federal suit to face a skeptical reception in court given the thin evidentiary basis described in the complaint. But even an unsuccessful suit could delay certification long enough to inject fresh uncertainty into a race that may determine which party controls the Senate next year, a prospect that keeps both parties' lawyers watching Alaska closely through Election Day and beyond.
