Judge Dismisses Trump-Ordered Lawsuit Over Alaska Senate Race; DOJ Appeals

A federal judge on Sunday dismissed the Justice Department's lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska's U.S. Senate election if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses, and the department filed notice that it would appeal within about an hour of the ruling, two days before Alaska's Tuesday election. U.S. District Judge Sharon L. Gleason, sitting in the federal courthouse in Anchorage, found that the government had failed to show its claimed injury could be fixed by any order a court could issue, and dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction, without giving the government another chance to amend its complaint.

The numbers

The 20-page order, filed in Case No. 3:26-cv-00376-SLG, granted three separate motions to dismiss, from the state of Alaska, from Democratic nominee Mary Peltola's campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and from a group of Alaska voters joined by the League of Women Voters of Alaska and Common Cause. Judge Gleason wrote that the Justice Department's own request, to have ballots cast for a second candidate named Sullivan segregated and investigated after the vote, would not actually redress any injury, since Alaska law already preserves ballots in federal races for 22 months regardless of a federal investigation. She also invoked the Purcell principle, the doctrine that courts should avoid changing election procedures in the days before a vote because doing so risks "voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls." Within roughly an hour, Justice Department attorneys, including Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and U.S. Attorney Michael Heyman, filed a notice of appeal in the same case.

Context

The suit, filed October 22 at President Trump's direction, grew out of a ballot quirk: a second candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired Petersburg teacher with no party registration, qualified for the general-election ballot after Alaska's Supreme Court ruled over the summer that state election officials could not keep him off it. Dan S. Sullivan, the incumbent, and other Republicans have called the second Sullivan's candidacy a "sham" designed to siphon votes from the senator in his race against Peltola. A New York Times report cited in the Alaska coverage alleged that people connected to Democratic efforts helped recruit the second Sullivan, something Peltola's campaign has denied knowing about. The state's Division of Elections has said it addressed any confusion by listing the two candidates differently on the ballot, as "Dan S. Sullivan" and "Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr." The dismissal order noted that the court had also accepted outside legal briefs opposing the government's position, including one from the NAACP and one from election-law scholar Richard Hasen.

Reaction and what's next

Alaska's Department of Law, which represented the state in the case, had called the federal government's proposal to investigate individual ballots after the fact "half-baked," arguing it was logistically impossible without compromising Alaska's secret ballot, a position the judge ultimately adopted in her ruling. Separately, federal prosecutors in Alaska have said they are investigating whether the second Sullivan candidacy involved any crime, and the FBI has added resources in the state, according to Alaska Public Media's reporting, which also noted that a state lawmaker said FBI agents had visited donors to the second Sullivan's campaign. The Anchorage Daily News reported that a poll released the Friday before the ruling showed Peltola with a two-point lead and the second Sullivan drawing more than 4 percent of the vote, a margin that could matter in Alaska's ranked-choice system. With the lawsuit dismissed and an appeal now pending at the Ninth Circuit, Alaska's Division of Elections is expected to proceed with its normal count and certification process following Tuesday's election, while the appeal plays out separately in the courts.