A federal judge in Anchorage on Sunday dismissed the U.S. Justice Department's lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska's U.S. Senate race if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses — and the Justice Department filed notice that it is appealing within hours of the ruling, the Associated Press reported. U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason found that the government had failed to establish standing and had offered no lawful, workable way to carry out what it was asking the court to order, two days before Alaska votes in a ranked-choice election that could help decide control of the U.S. Senate.
Source: Associated Press
The ruling is the latest development in a case this newsroom has been following: as Awaaz Punjab reported on October 31, the Justice Department had asked the court to set aside ballots cast for a namesake candidate, retired teacher Daniel J. Sullivan, while the FBI contacted his donors in a parallel criminal investigation. The civil lawsuit, filed on October 22 — less than two weeks before the election, with early voting already underway — asked the court to stop Alaska from certifying any result in which the senator lost but might have won if every vote for Daniel J. Sullivan were reallocated, to segregate ballots cast for Daniel J. Sullivan, and to let investigators determine whether those voters had actually meant to vote for the senator. Those requests are allegations-based claims by the government; no court had accepted them, and no one in the race has been charged in connection with the namesake candidacy.
What Judge Gleason ruled
In a 20-page order in United States v. Alaska (No. 3:26-cv-00376), Gleason wrote that the relief the United States seeks is “infeasible” because many voters have already cast their ballots, and that the cast ballots have been separated from identifying information and mixed together. “More fundamentally, the United States provides no workable plan as to how it proposes to segregate ballots cast for Daniel J. Sullivan on Election Day and then conduct a court-ordered unspecified ‘investigation’ of those ballots in a manner that would preserve voter secrecy,” she wrote. “Requiring the segregation of ballots cast by voters for Daniel J. Sullivan so that these voters can be further investigated by law enforcement is not a remedy that this Court can or should order,” she added, saying it would violate Alaskans' right to a secret ballot.
Source: Democracy Docket
Gleason dismissed the lawsuit for lack of standing — specifically, the government could not show that the court had the power to redress the injury it alleged — and denied the department leave to amend, finding another rewrite would be futile. She also wrote that the administration's attempt to block certification ran counter to the Constitution, which gives states the authority to run elections, and cited the Supreme Court's Purcell principle, under which federal courts should generally not change election rules close to an election. “These requests certainly involve the time, place, and manner of Alaska's election, which are the responsibilities of the State, not the executive branch of the federal government,” she wrote.
How two Sullivans landed on one ballot
Senator Dan S. Sullivan, a Republican ally of President Donald Trump, faces Democrat Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman, in a race that is among a handful expected to determine which party controls the Senate for the final two years of Trump's term. Also on the ballot is Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired teacher running with no party affiliation, who has done little campaigning. On the ballot, the senator is listed as Dan S. Sullivan, Republican and incumbent; the teacher appeared in the August open primary as Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., with no party affiliation. Peltola placed first in that primary, the senator second, and Daniel J. Sullivan won about 2.5% of the vote — enough to finish in the top four and qualify for the November 3 ranked-choice election. State courts, including the Alaska Supreme Court, had already rejected an earlier Republican-backed effort to keep the retired teacher off the primary ballot, and attorneys for the Alaska Department of Law, representing state elections officials, called the federal case “meritless” and said the state had taken significant steps to distinguish the two Sullivans, including candidate biographies in state-distributed election pamphlets.
The senator and his allies have for months portrayed Daniel J. Sullivan as a sham candidate recruited to confuse voters and help Peltola — an allegation, not a proven fact. In the week before Election Day, The New York Times reported that Peltola's campaign was involved in efforts to recruit the second Sullivan. Peltola has denied any involvement in either Sullivan campaign: “I am not interested in tricking voters,” she said at a recent campaign event, and Daniel J. Sullivan said shortly after entering the race in June that he had had no contact with her campaign about running. Senator Sullivan repeated the accusation on CNN's “State of the Union” earlier on Sunday: “I'm sure I'm going to lose a lot of votes to that trickery,” he said. “There is no way this went on for a year that they weren't informing her. She got caught lying, and she's still lying to the Alaskan people, the media, to all of us.” Those claims remain unproven, and the dismissal does not decide them.
Source: Associated Press
President Trump, who said he ordered the lawsuit, posted on social media on Sunday: “The Fake Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr., has DISAPPEARED! Nobody can find him, including Law Enforcement.” Separately, the criminal investigation continues: on Thursday the Justice Department escalated it with a raft of new grand jury subpoenas, a person familiar with the matter told AP, and the FBI has been contacting people who donated to Daniel J. Sullivan, some of whom told AP agents asked whether they had been misled about which candidate they were supporting. Alaska's Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, has also ordered a state investigation and has suggested he may not certify a possible Peltola victory — a state-level question the federal ruling does not touch.
Reaction — and an appeal within hours
Shortly after the ruling, the Justice Department filed a notice saying it was appealing. “Alaskan voters deserve a fair election, not to be misled in an attempt to rig outcomes,” a department spokesperson said, adding that the judge had dismissed the case on procedural grounds but had not disputed the government's argument that Daniel J. Sullivan entered the race “as a frivolous candidate to confuse voters.” On the other side, Devan Barber, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said: “Today's ruling is a victory for democracy and a clear message to Donald Trump and Senate Republicans: No one, no matter how powerful, can toss out free and fair elections just because they don't like the result.” Kristen Clarke, general counsel of the NAACP, which had filed a brief supporting dismissal, called the decision “a big win for the voters in Alaska” and the DOJ case “a baseless, eleventh hour attempt to hijack this midterm election.” The senator's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
Source: Associated Press
Voting ends Tuesday, November 3, in Alaska's ranked-choice Senate election. Unless an appellate court intervenes on the Justice Department's appeal, Alaska officials will count and certify the result through the ordinary process. The separate criminal investigation into the namesake candidacy — grand jury subpoenas and FBI donor interviews — continues independently of this civil ruling.
For readers in Alaska and across the Punjabi diaspora in the United States, the case is a plain civics lesson with real stakes: a federal court has said that once ballots are cast in secret, the government cannot pull one candidate's ballots back out and interrogate the voters who cast them — and that the time, place and manner of an election belong to the state. Whether voters reward Senator Sullivan or Mary Peltola on Tuesday, the count itself will now proceed without the certification block the Justice Department sought.