President Donald Trump said Friday that he has directed his administration to file a lawsuit to block the certification of Alaska’s U.S. Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, kicking off what many fear could become a long battle between the government and the states to certify an election where the president’s party is in trouble.
“I’m the one who said do it,” Trump told reporters as he landed for a campaign rally in Florida.
The suit, filed Thursday evening, addresses one of the president’s long-standing complaints in the Senate race: the presence of a second candidate named Dan Sullivan, who Republicans fear could siphon votes away from the incumbent in what will likely be a photo finish contest with Democrat Mary Peltola, a former state congresswoman.
The second Sullivan, whose name is Daniel J. Sullivan, a native of the small fishing community of Petersburg, said he decided to run alone, but Republicans argued he was a Democratic plant designed to siphon votes from their candidate.
The lawsuit filed by the Republican president’s Justice Department in federal court in Alaska demands that the state be blocked from certifying a Peltola victory if Daniel J. Sullivan remains on the ballot. “The United States therefore brings this lawsuit to protect the integrity of the 2026 Senate elections in Alaska,” the lawsuit states, asserting that federal law requires states to protect the integrity of federal elections.
The legal challenge took place 11 days before the Nov. 3 election and months after the final vote.
The Alaska Supreme Court rejected a previous Republican attempt to remove Daniel J. Sullivan from the ballot, and state Republican officials made the decisions on how to put him on the ballot. He will appear without a party designation next to his name, while the senator will be listed as the incumbent Republican president. Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system will also allow voters to select both men if there is a mix-up.
(Alaska’s U.S. Senate race is costliest in state history)
Peltola and Senator Sullivan were top vote-getters in nonpartisan primaries
The senator received more than 68,000 votes in the August primary, while the difficult Sullivan received 4,107, or about 2 percent of the total vote. Peltola, who had previously served one term in the House, was the first to gain votes in the nonpartisan primary. Both parties expect whoever wins the vote in November will win it by a slim margin in a state of 738,000.
The campaign for Sen. Dan Sullivan did not address whether the senator supported the Justice Department’s intervention. “We will let the DOJ complaint take its course,” campaign spokesman Nate Adams said in a text message. “Alaskans can tell the difference between a Democratic show and Senator Sullivan’s strong record for Alaska.”
Daniel J. Sullivan, whose presence on the ballot is at issue in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Donald Trump knows Dan Sullivan is going to lose the election, so now his Justice Department is filing a sham lawsuit to subvert the will of Alaska voters and steal an election if he loses,” said Devan Barber, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
In a statement released Friday, the Justice Department noted that Alaska election officials, who are Republican, determined that Sullivan’s campaign was an attempt to “mislead” voters and wanted him removed from the ballot. A state court and the Alaska Supreme Court disagreed and kept the second Sullivan on the ballot.
“The Department of Justice, consistent with the National Voter Registration Act passed by Congress, is taking the necessary steps to ensure that this frivolous application does not undermine the integrity of Alaska’s elections or the will of its voters,” the department’s statement said.
The Justice Department is increasingly being used to support the Republican president’s political operations, targeting his enemies and prosecuting Democratic-controlled states ahead of elections. Democrats and many voting rights advocates have long feared that the administration would try to block certification of elections that Trump’s party loses, just as he unsuccessfully tried to do when he lost the 2020 White House race to Democrat Joe Biden.
U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said this was unlikely outside of extreme circumstances. “It is not the intent of the DOJ, and it is never our intent, to inappropriately interfere with elections or the state certification process,” he told reporters Thursday in Virginia before the lawsuit was filed.
The lawsuit was signed by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Stanley Woodward, who represented Trump allies and the Jan. 6 defendants before becoming a top appointee at the department.
(Trump administration announces hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for Alaska as election nears)
The Constitution gives states the power to hold elections
Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, said the trial would likely only happen if Republicans narrowly lost the Alaska Senate race and would likely not survive for long. “The law simply does not allow the Department of Justice to require certification,” Muller said. “The lawsuit may well be driven by a wide Democratic victory or a narrow Republican victory, and if not, the court will likely throw it out next month. »
The U.S. Constitution grants states the power to conduct their own elections. Elections for federal offices like the Senate must meet standards set by Congress. This division of power has frustrated Trump, who has repeatedly tried to take control of election procedures through executive orders that the courts have blocked.
The final step in a state election is to officially certify the winner, an act the administration’s lawsuit seeks to prevent, she asks, “pending an investigation into whether the votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were supposed to be cast for Senator Sullivan.”
The process in Alaska is complicated by the state’s ranked-choice voting system, which Trump opposes, and many expect it will take weeks before a winner is known. The state is also planning an initiative to repeal this system.
Trump multiplies complaints about a vote with dueling Sullivans
Trump has complained about Daniel J. Sullivan’s presence on the ballot, referring to him at a rally in Alaska this month and in repeated social media posts, including one this week where he called him “CHEATING.”
“We are exploring powerful legal options to remove fraudulent Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. from the ballot and hold Democrats accountable for their election interference, in the interest of justice and fairness,” the president wrote Wednesday.
Clogging a ballot with third-party candidates to siphon off votes from the other major party is a long-standing tactic in the country’s two-party system. Republicans have been linked to an effort to persuade Ohio voters to support a socialist in that state’s Senate race, which could help Republican Sen. Jon Husted fend off a challenge from former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.
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Associated Press writers Ali Swenson in New York and Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington, D.C. contributed to this report.
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