A federal judge in Alaska has dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit that preemptively challenged the results of a U.S. Senate race featuring two candidates with the same name — an incumbent Republican and another man who could be a spoilsport.
The ruling is the latest in a series of legal defeats for the Trump administration, which sought to interfere in state-run elections.
The U.S. District Court in California on Friday blocked the administration from threatening to sue state and local election officials who failed to follow the department’s guidelines on handling ballots.
Also Friday, a federal appeals court rejected a request to order California officials to void about 20,000 mail-in ballots that the administration said were sent to possible noncitizens.
In Alaska, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit last month at President Trump’s request, asking the judge to block certification of the state’s U.S. Senate election results if Sen. Daniel S. Sullivan lost but would have won if votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired teacher, had gone to the incumbent president.
In this scenario, the suit also demands an investigation into whether the voters who chose the retired teacher actually intended to vote for the senator.
Federal officials have not said how an investigation into anonymous votes would be conducted.
In her ruling Sunday, Chief Judge Sharon Gleason of the U.S. District Court in Alaska wrote that she did not see how the federal government’s proposed solution to any confusion would solve the problem if it existed — or how that approach could work given that the right to a secret ballot is a fundamental principle of American democracy.
The federal government, she wrote, “fails to refute concerns about preserving ballot secrecy and provides no explanation for how its request for ballot segregation and a court-ordered investigation by law enforcement into the intent of certain voters could be implemented while still preserving ballot secrecy.” »
Kiersten Pels, a Justice Department spokesperson, said the administration plans to appeal the rejection and noted that the judge did not address “the United States’ argument that Daniel J. Sullivan (aka Decoy Dan) entered the race as a frivolous candidate to confuse voters.”
The administration’s lawsuit accuses Daniel J. Sulivan of trying to “mislead Alaska voters into believing that he is Senator Sullivan.” Daniel J. Sullivan said he voted for Democrats in the last three presidential elections and for Mary Peltola, the current Democratic Senate candidate, in her 2022 and 2024 congressional campaigns.
The lawsuit also says he changed his party affiliation from Independent to Republican only when he filed to run, and that his campaign website uses the same dark blue and yellow color scheme as the outgoing president’s.
A New York Times investigation found that a Democratic operative linked to Ms. Peltola’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee enlisted Daniel J. Sullivan to run as part of a broader effort to recruit independent and third-party candidates who could take votes away from the incumbent president.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, ordered a criminal investigation into Peltola’s campaign even as the state’s elections division, overseen by his lieutenant governor, also a Republican, fought the Trump administration’s civil lawsuit.
Ms. Peltola and the National Democrats have denied any connection to Daniel J. Sullivan’s candidacy, and they have joined the civil case as additional defendants alongside the National Democrats, the League of Women Voters and Common Cause, a self-described nonpartisan government watchdog organization.
Daniel S. Sullivan, the outgoing senator, pledged in a CNN interview Sunday to support any election outcome, but also suggested, without providing an explanation or details, that the election could be “stolen.”
In their defense in the Justice Department’s lawsuit, attorneys for the state of Alaska pointed out that state courts had already rejected an attempt by the state elections agency to remove Daniel J. Sullivan from the ballot and that the final ballot was designed to differentiate the two men: It lists the senator as “Dan S. Sullivan” and notes his party affiliation and tenure, and the other man is “Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.” with no party affiliation included.
Alaska also uses ranked-choice voting in state and federal general elections, which means voters are familiar with the system. Any voter confused by the existence of two Dan Sullivans might simply rank the two candidates.
Judge Gleason previously expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s case in a ruling last month agreeing to a speedy hearing. In that order, she pointed out that the federal lawsuit came after Alaskans had already started voting for November and nearly four months after the Alaska Supreme Court ordered the state Division of Elections to include Daniel J. Sullivan on the ballot.
In Sunday’s dismissal ruling, she noted that federal lawyers, in their filings, said they did not seek to interfere in the timing, location or manner of Alaska’s elections — matters that the U.S. Constitution leaves in the hands of the states.
But, Judge Gleason said, the federal government’s proposed responses to any voter confusion were “a court order preventing the state from certifying the election if certain circumstances arise; a court order requiring the state to segregate and preserve certain ballots; and a court order authorizing the United States to conduct an investigation into the intent of voters who voted for Daniel J. Sullivan. »
“These demands certainly concern the time, place and manner of elections in Alaska,” she wrote.
To the contrary, the judge added, such federal intervention in the middle of an ongoing election would cause precisely the type of voter confusion that the administration claims to be trying to prevent.
Bayliss Wagner And Glenn Thrush reports contributed.
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