Donald Trump said he ordered the justice department to file a lawsuit to block the certification of Alaska’s US Senate results if the Republican incumbent loses, a move that voting rights experts called an“unprecedented intervention” by the federal government with control of Congress in the balance.
“I’m the one that said do it,” the president told reporters as he landed in Florida for a campaign rally on Friday.
The justice department argued in its lawsuit, filed less than two weeks before election day, that there could be “voter confusion” over the presence of two candidates named Dan Sullivan on the November ballot, which Republicans fear could take away votes from the incumbentand influence the race’s outcome in favor of the Democratic nominee, Mary Peltola.
Experts saw the lawsuit as extremely weak and unlikely to succeed. “The legal claim is so absurdly thin, there’s essentially no likelihood of success,” Derek Mueller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, wrote in a blogpost.
Control of the Senate could come down to Alaska, and polls suggest the Republican incumbent senator, Dan S Sullivan, is in a dead heat with Peltola, a former Democratic congresswoman. Another candidate named Daniel J Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher, is also running as a Republican and will appear on the November general election ballot.
The federal government argues in the complaint that “the sole purpose” of Dan J Sullivan’s candidacy is to “benefit the Peltola campaign by reducing the number of votes for Senator Sullivan”.
As a result, “there is a substantial likelihood that a certification of the election will reflect an electoral process that lacked integrity,” the complaint states.
The administration isasking for a pause in certifying the vote in Alaska “pending an investigation” to determine whether votes that are cast for Dan J Sullivan were actually meant to be for the Republican incumbent.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the department’s lawsuit was “an unprecedented intervention by the federal government” and said the issue of two candidates with similar names appearing on the ballot had already been “fully litigated by Alaska’s courts”.
He said the lawsuit “raises serious concerns about political interference”, adding that he could not recall an administration “ever attempting to stop the certification of an election – and certainly not 11 days before polls close”.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that Daniel J Sullivan – who is challenging the two-term incumbent – is an “impostor”.
Meanwhile, many Republicans across the country have accused the former teacher, who lives in Petersburg – a town of about 3,000 people in the southern part of Alaska – of being a Democratic plant in place to cannibalize votes from Dan S Sullivan.
Trump has targeted the state’s use of ranked-choice voting, adopted by voters in 2020, which he has attacked as a “scam”. At a recent rally in Wasilla, Trump encouraged Alaskans to support a state ballot measure to repeal it.
Under the state’s voting system, the top four candidates from an open primary advance to the general election. Voters then rank candidates in order of preference, and votes can transfer to their next-ranked candidate as lower-placed contenders are eliminated.
The incumbent senator will appear on the 3 November ballot in Alaska with the words “(Registered Republican) Incumbent” next to his name to make it clearer for voters.
Voting rights experts say the basis for the lawsuit is thin given the fact that any meaningful investigation into voters’ preferences after they have voted would be practically impossible to conduct since Americans vote on a secret ballot.
Experts were also skeptical of the language in federal law the justice department cited to justify its lawsuit. In the filing, the justice department pointed to broad language in the preamble of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) saying one of the purposes of the law “was to protect the integrity of the electoral process”. Such an argument was akin to “suing the government for money because the Declaration of Independence guarantees ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’”, Chris Shenton, a lawyer at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, posted on X.
In June, the Alaska supreme court ruled that Dan J Sullivan could remain on the ballot, despite the frustration it has caused the Trump administration and national Republicans.
The Trump administration’s targeting of Alaska’s Senate race is particularly consequential as Democrats increasingly believe Peltola, a moderate Democrat who supports gun rights and oil development, is on the verge of flipping the red-leaning state.
Peltola would be the first Democrat to win the seat in nearly two decades if she is successful.
In an interview with MS Now on Friday, Peltola described the lawsuit as “a distraction” that amounted to “corruption”.
“This is clearly a very desperate attempt to cling to power, using his allies in Washington DC, to rig the system even further,” Peltola said, adding: “There’s no reason to have any doubt that Alaskans know exactly who they’re voting for.
