JUNEAU, Alaska — President Donald Trump on Thursday demanded that Alaska hand every vote cast for two other candidates in the state's unfinished U.S. Senate race to Republican Senator Dan Sullivan and declare the election over, intervening directly in a count that Democrat Mary Peltola currently leads by 637 votes. In a Truth Social post on Thursday morning, the president wrote: "The vote totals for the Fake Dan Sullivan, plus the other 'slug' that the Dems put on the Ballot, should be immediately given to the REAL Dan Sullivan, and the Election is over — He easily wins. There is no other fair solution!" The "Fake Dan Sullivan" is Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired teacher from Petersburg who shares the senator's name and has drawn 3,600 votes — more than five times the margin separating the two leading candidates. The "slug" is Republican Gerald Heikes, who has drawn more than 4,800 votes.

Source: Juneau Independent

The race the president wants ended is nowhere near finished. In the Alaska Division of Elections tally last updated at 2:11 p.m. on Wednesday, Peltola held 48.2 percent of the votes counted so far, Dan S. Sullivan 47.9 percent, Heikes 2.3 percent and Daniel J. Sullivan 1.7 percent. In raw votes reported by the Associated Press, Peltola has 102,962 first-choice votes to the senator's 102,325. The Associated Press estimated on Wednesday that about one-fourth of all ballots cast remain to be counted, and Alaska law allows ballots mailed by Election Day to keep arriving — up to 10 days afterwards for ballots sent inside the United States and up to 15 days for overseas ballots. Most of the ballots still outstanding are from rural districts, which reporting in Alaska expects to favour Peltola.

Source: Associated Press / Alaska Division of Elections

Why the demand has no route in Alaska law

There is no precedent in American elections for giving votes cast for one candidate to a different candidate, and Alaska's system points the other way. Alaska uses a Top-4 primary followed by ranked-choice voting in the general election: if no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated and those ballots move to each voter's next choice, round by round, until someone passes 50 percent. That tabulation is scheduled for November 18, and the state is set to certify the result on November 25. Under that system, the 3,600 ballots marked for Daniel J. Sullivan are not a pool to be reassigned by officials — they belong to the voters who cast them, and in a tabulation they would flow, if at all, to whatever second choice each of those voters marked. An analysis published by the Alaska Beacon on Wednesday found that Senator Sullivan would actually gain ground in a tabulation of the ballots already cast, because Heikes voters ranked him next more often — but it also noted that more than a third of the voters who ranked Heikes or Daniel J. Sullivan first marked no second choice at all, so their ballots would simply exhaust. The New York Times election forecast, which stopped updating at 3 a.m. on Wednesday, projected Peltola would ultimately win by about 2.9 points.

The lawsuit that came before the demand

Thursday's post is the second front in a fight the administration opened before a single vote was counted. On October 23, at the president's direction, the U.S. Department of Justice sued to block Alaska from certifying the Senate result under one condition only: Senator Sullivan losing narrowly, by a margin smaller than Daniel J. Sullivan's vote share. A federal judge in Anchorage dismissed that lawsuit without a hearing before Election Day, and the Justice Department is now appealing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The appeal's timetable underlines how far the legal fight trails the election itself: the department's opening brief is due December 14 and answering briefs are due January 11, 2027 — eight days after the new Senate, sworn in on January 3, takes its seats. On Election Day, Attorney General Todd Blanche vowed to keep fighting "tooth and nail to stop this process," and the Juneau Independent reports that some Republican senators have suggested they will refuse to seat Peltola if she wins — a step that would move the fight from Alaska's count to the Senate floor.

Source: Democracy Docket

The 'decoy candidate' allegation, labelled as such

The claim underneath both the lawsuit and Thursday's post is an allegation, not a finding. Trump and Republicans allege that the Peltola campaign recruited Daniel J. Sullivan and other spoiler candidates to confuse voters — an allegation Peltola has denied. Earlier in the cycle, Republicans tried to have Daniel J. Sullivan removed from the ballot altogether; the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that it was unlawful for election officials to disqualify him. Legal experts cited in Alaska reporting describe so-called ballot stacking — encouraging a same-name or spoiler candidate — as a common and generally legal campaign tactic, and no court has found that any law was broken in this race. Governor Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, has also sought criminal investigations into the recruitment claims, according to Alaska reporting; those claims remain allegations while the count continues.

The stakes are narrower than the fight suggests. Democrats have already won control of the Senate with at least 54 seats, and Alaska — like Mississippi, the only other uncalled Senate race — will decide only the size of that majority, not who holds it. But the Alaska fight has become the sharpest test of the post-midterm landscape: a president who said on election night that he would accept the results is now asking a state to set aside its own counting rules in one of the two races his party has not yet lost. For Alaska voters — including the state's small but growing Punjabi and South Asian communities in Anchorage and Fairbanks, many of them truckers on the Dalton and Parks highway corridors — the practical question is simpler: their ballots, like everyone else's, are still being counted under the ranked-choice rules Alaskans themselves adopted, and the next official milestone is the November 18 tabulation.