Justice Department sues to block certification of Alaska's Senate race if Republican loses

The Justice Department sued Alaska's elections office on Thursday, asking a federal judge to let the state withhold certification of its U.S. Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses and ballots cast for a second candidate who shares his name would have been enough to change the outcome. President Trump told reporters the next day that he had personally directed the lawsuit.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska as Case No. 3:26-cv-00376-SLG, names the State of Alaska, Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher, the state's precinct election boards and its ballot counting review board as defendants. It does not ask a court to throw out any votes before Election Day. Instead, it asks the court to declare that a certified result would be unlawful, and to bar certification outright, in one specific scenario: Democrat Mary Peltola wins, Sullivan loses, and the retired teacher and Petersburg City Council member Daniel J. Sullivan drew enough votes under the state's ranked-choice system that, redirected to the senator, they would have put him over the top.

A second Dan Sullivan on the ballot

The dispute traces back to May, when Daniel J. Sullivan filed to run for the Senate seat held by Dan S. Sullivan since 2015. According to the complaint, the challenger asked to appear on the ballot as "Dan Sullivan," registered as a Republican for the first time in his life days before filing, and built a campaign website with a color scheme and layout similar to the senator's own site. Alaska's Division of Elections removed him from the ballot in June, with Beecher writing in a letter attached to the federal complaint that his candidacy was filed "for the purpose of confusing or misleading voters and compromising the fairness of the ballot."

A state superior court judge overturned that decision, finding Beecher's reasoning unsupported, and the Alaska Supreme Court summarily affirmed that ruling on June 29, saying a full written opinion would come later. It has not yet been issued. As a result, both men appeared on the August 18 all-candidate primary ballot alongside Peltola and Republican Gerald Heikes. Peltola took 49.5% of the vote, Sen. Sullivan 41.4%, Daniel J. Sullivan 2.5% and Heikes 1.1%, and all four advanced to the November 3 general election under Alaska's top-four primary system.

Separately, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has filed a series of complaints against Daniel J. Sullivan with the Federal Election Commission, alleging that his campaign received improper financial help from a political consultant and missed required filing deadlines. NBC News reported in August that federal investigators had opened a grand jury inquiry into whether his candidacy violated election law, though it remains unclear whether that investigation produced any of the material cited in Thursday's complaint.

What the lawsuit asks for

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward signed the complaint, arguing that Congress charged states with "protecting the integrity of the electoral process" under the National Voter Registration Act and that the Supreme Court has recognized a state interest in shielding elections from "frivolous or fraudulent candidacies." The filing contends that any certified result "tainted by the inclusion on the ballot of Daniel J. Sullivan" would violate that obligation, and asks the court to enjoin Alaska officials from certifying such a result.

Under Alaska's ranked-choice system, if no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes outright, the last-place finisher is eliminated and that candidate's ballots are reassigned to voters' next choice, a process repeated until someone crosses 50%. The Justice Department's filing illustrates, with a sample ballot, how a voter intending to back the incumbent could instead rank Daniel J. Sullivan first by mistake. State election officials, including Beecher, are given 16 days after the election to complete a ballot counting review before results are certified, under Alaska law cited in the complaint.

The timing drew immediate notice: Attorney General Todd Blanche had said just hours before the filing that the department did not intend to "improperly interfere with elections or the state certification process," reserving intervention for what he called a "doomsday scenario." Trump, asked by reporters in Florida why he ordered the suit, said simply, "I'm the one that said do it," and wrote online that the second Sullivan's campaign amounted to "CHEATING."

Reaction splits even Republicans

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska's senior Republican senator, broke from the administration over the filing.

"The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit," Murkowski said.

Peltola's campaign called the suit "flagrant, flagrant corruption" and said her opponent was "using his connections in Washington, D.C., to manipulate the situation," adding that she was "very concerned about Alaskans' voices not being heard." The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee described it as "a sham lawsuit to overturn the will of Alaska voters." Sen. Sullivan's own campaign distanced itself somewhat from the suit, with a spokesman saying only that the campaign would "let the DOJ complaint run its course" and dismissing the controversy as a "Democrat sideshow."

Election law specialists outside the campaigns were skeptical of the legal theory. Derek Muller, a University of Notre Dame law professor who studies election administration, said "the statute simply doesn't let the Department of Justice enjoin certification" and predicted the case "could well be mooted by a wide Democratic victory" or otherwise dismissed after the election. David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research called the filing "an unprecedented intervention by the federal government" into a state's handling of its own election.

Who is affected, and what happens next

The immediate stakes fall on Alaska's roughly 500,000 active registered voters, who begin receiving and returning ballots in the final stretch before the November 3 election, and on the composition of a Senate currently separated by a handful of seats, where Alaska is one of a small number of genuinely competitive 2026 races. A prolonged certification fight would also affect Daniel J. Sullivan directly; his campaign and Sen. Sullivan's campaign did not respond to reporters' requests for comment on the suit, according to multiple news organizations that sought reaction Thursday and Friday.

Alaska's Division of Elections said only that it was reviewing the complaint and remained focused on administering the election and minimizing voter confusion. No hearing date had been set as of Friday afternoon. Because the complaint seeks relief that would apply only if a specific vote count materializes, legal observers expect any substantive court action to wait until ballots are counted and the ranked-choice tabulation is run, likely in the weeks immediately following Election Day. If Sen. Sullivan wins outright, or if Peltola's margin proves wide enough that Daniel J. Sullivan's votes could not plausibly have changed the result, the case could be dismissed as moot without ever reaching the question Woodward's complaint poses. If the race is close, Alaska would face the prospect of a federal court weighing in on whether the state's own director of elections can certify a winner at all, a scenario with no clear precedent under federal election law.