A federal judge in Alaska has dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit that pre-emptively challenged the results in a U.S. Senate race featuring two candidates with the same name — a Republican incumbent and another man who could be a spoiler.
The ruling is the latest in a series of court defeats for the Trump administration, which has been seeking to intervene in state-administered elections.
On Friday, the U.S. District Court in California blocked the administration from threatening to prosecute state and local election officials who do not comply with the department’s directives on handling ballots.
Also on Friday, a federal appeals court panel denied a request to order California officials to set aside about 20,000 mail-in ballots that the administration claimed had been sent to possible noncitizens.
In Alaska, the Justice Department filed its lawsuit last month at President Trump’s direction, asking the judge to block certification of the state’s U.S. Senate election results if Senator Daniel S. Sullivan loses but would have won had votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired teacher, gone to the incumbent instead.
In that scenario, the suit also demands an investigation into whether voters who selected the retired teacher actually intended to vote for the senator.
Federal officials have not made clear how an investigation into anonymous ballots would be conducted.
In her Sunday ruling, Chief Judge Sharon Gleason of 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 even existed — or how the approach could work given the right to a secret ballot is a core principle of American democracy.
The federal government, she wrote, “offers no rebuttal to the concerns regarding preservation of the secrecy of voting and provides no explanation of how its request for ballot segregation and a court-ordered investigation by law enforcement officers into certain voters’ intent could be implemented while preserving the secrecy of the ballot.”
Kiersten Pels, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, said the administration plans to appeal the dismissal and noted that the judge didn’t not address “the argument of the United States that Daniel J. Sullivan (a/k/a Decoy Dan) entered the race as a frivolous candidate to confuse voters.”
The administration’s lawsuit accuses Daniel J. Sulivan of trying to “dupe Alaska’s voters into believing that he is Senator Sullivan.” Daniel J. Sullivan has said he voted for Democrats in the last three presidential races and for Mary Peltola, the current Democratic Senate nominee on the ballot, in her 2022 and 2024 campaigns for Congress.
The suit also notes that he switched 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 incumbent’s.
A New York Times investigation revealed that a Democratic operative connected 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 might peel votes away from the incumbent.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, has ordered a criminal investigation into the Peltola campaign even as the state elections division, overseen by his lieutenant governor, also a Republican, fought the Trump administration’s civil lawsuit.
Ms. Peltola and national Democrats have denied any connection to Daniel J. Sullivan’s candidacy, and they joined the civil case as additional defendants along with national Democrats, the League of Women Voters and Common Cause, a self-described nonpartisan government watchdog organization.
Daniel S. Sullivan, the incumbent senator, promised in an interview with CNN Sunday to support any election results but also suggested, without offering explanation or details, that the election could be “stolen.”
In its defense in the Justice Department’s lawsuit, lawyers with the state of Alaska noted that state courts had already rejected an attempt by the state’s elections agency to take Daniel J. Sullivan off the ballot and that the final ballot was designed to differentiate between the two men: It lists the senator as “Dan S. Sullivan” and notes his party affiliation and incumbency, 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, meaning voters are familiar with the system. Any voter confused by the existence of two Dan Sullivans could simply rank both candidates.
Judge Gleason had already expressed skepticism of 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 begun casting ballots for November and nearly four months after the Alaska Supreme Court directed 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 were not attempting to interfere in the time, place and manner of Alaskan elections — matters the U.S. Constitution leaves in the hands of states.
But, Judge Gleason said, the federal government’s proposed answers to any voter confusion were “a court order preventing the State from certifying the election if certain circumstances occur; a court order requiring the State to segregate and preserve certain ballots; and a court order permitting the United States to conduct an investigation into the intent of those voters who cast ballots for Daniel J. Sullivan.
“These requests certainly involve the time, place, and manner of Alaska’s election,” she wrote.
If anything, the judge added, such federal intervention amid an ongoing election would cause the precise sort of voter confusion the administration says it is trying to prevent.
Bayliss Wagner and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
