The United States Department of Justice sued the State of Alaska in federal court on Thursday, asking a judge to hold up certification of the state's United States Senate race if Senator Dan Sullivan loses and the votes cast for a namesake challenger, Daniel J. Sullivan, would have changed the result. President Donald Trump says the lawsuit was his call. "I'm the one that said do it," the president told reporters on Friday.
The complaint, United States v. Alaska, was filed on October 22 in the United States District Court in Anchorage, where it was assigned to Judge Sharon L. Gleason, twelve days before the November 3 election. It names the state, Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher and the state's election and ballot-review boards. The suit does not ask the court to remove Daniel J. Sullivan from the ballot or to stop the voting — ballots carrying his name have been cast since early voting began on October 19. It asks instead that certification of the Senate result be held up pending an investigation into whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan, and only if two things happen together: the senator loses, and the namesake's votes would have flipped the outcome through the ranked-choice count.
The Justice Department argues that Daniel J. Sullivan's candidacy "threatens to mislead" Alaskans who mean to vote for the incumbent, that some of the senator's supporters will likely vote for the wrong Sullivan by mistake, and that others may be confused about how to rank the Republican candidates and leave the senator off their ballots entirely. The department says his "sole purpose" in running is to benefit the campaign of Democrat Mary Peltola by reducing the number of votes for Senator Sullivan. A Justice Department spokesperson said the complaint was filed "to ensure that this frivolous candidacy does not undermine the integrity of Alaska's election or the will of its voters."
The department's only legal claim rests on the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, a law mostly concerned with voter registration and the accuracy of voter rolls. The complaint cites one of the law's stated purposes — "to protect the integrity of the electoral process" — as the authority for federal intervention when allegedly deceptive conduct threatens the accuracy of an election result.
President Trump had signaled the move the evening before the filing, writing that "we are looking at powerful legal options to remove the fraudulent Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. from the Ballot." On Thursday he took personal credit for the lawsuit on an Alaska radio program, and on Friday he confirmed to reporters that he personally directed the Justice Department to file it.
Four candidates are on the November 3 ballot: Senator Dan S. Sullivan, a Republican seeking re-election; Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired teacher from Petersburg; Democrat Mary Peltola, a former United States representative; and Republican Gerald Heikes. On the ballot itself, the namesake appears first as "Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr.," with no party affiliation listed, while the senator is listed as "Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican) Incumbent" — the first time in the state's history that the word "Incumbent" has appeared beside a candidate's name.
Alaska has already fought this fight once. In June, Elections Director Carol Beecher rejected Daniel J. Sullivan's filing, finding that he had filed to confuse voters. The state's courts, including the Alaska Supreme Court, ruled that election officials could not keep him off the ballot: the law limits their judgment to whether a candidate meets the qualifications for the office, and a candidate's motives are not among those qualifications. Daniel J. Sullivan has said that he chose to run on his own.
Under Alaska's ranked-choice system, voters rank the candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins a majority, the lowest-ranked candidates are eliminated one by one and their ballots move to each voter's next choice until one candidate holds a majority. The Justice Department's fear, set out in its complaint, is that confusion between the two Sullivans could distort that count at every stage.
The Peltola campaign answered the lawsuit on Friday. Its spokesperson, Harry Child, called it "a despicable political threat to overturn an election," and said: "We will fight to ensure every single eligible voter in Alaska can make their voice heard and that no bureaucrat or politician from the Lower 48 can interfere with our lawful, secure elections."
The League of Women Voters of Alaska, Common Cause and individual voters, represented by the ACLU, have moved to intervene in the case and dismiss the suit, calling it frivolous and an election-eve interference.
Election-law experts are skeptical of the department's theory. Derek Muller, a law professor at Notre Dame, called it "strange and unusual," saying he had never seen the voter-registration law's stated purposes used this way, and added: "The statute simply doesn't let the Department of Justice enjoin certification." The Justice Department's leadership insists the suit is about the integrity of the count, not the outcome: "It is not DOJ's intention to and it's never our intention to improperly interfere with elections."
The race is one of the most closely watched in the country, in a Senate where a single seat can decide control of the chamber. Alaskans finish voting on November 3.
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