A federal judge on Sunday dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska’s U.S. Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan loses, two days before Election Day.
U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason wrote that the relief the government sought was “infeasible” because many ballots have already been cast and mixed together, the AP reported. She also wrote that the government “provides no workable plan” for separating ballots ranking Dan J. Sullivan and investigating them “in a manner that would preserve voter secrecy.”
Gleason found the federal government did not have the ability to bring the case, NPR reported. Justice Department attorneys are expected to appeal, according to NPR. The ruling does not end the criminal investigation into how the second Sullivan got on the ballot.
It was, for a while, considered one of those colorful quirks that crop up in the course of an election: the fact that not one but two candidates named Dan Sullivan will appear on the Nov. 3 ballot for U.S. senator from Alaska.
One Dan Sullivan — Dan S. Sullivan — is the state’s incumbent Republican senator. He is trying to fend off a fierce challenge from former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola and secure a third term. The other Dan Sullivan — Dan J. Sullivan — is a retired teacher from a tiny fishing village along the Alaska Panhandle. He has never previously campaigned for public office, and he switched his registration from “unaffiliated” to “Republican” just before the deadline to run. (He has since switched back to unaffiliated.)
But now the situation seems to be getting more serious. At President Trump’s direction, the Justice Department sued last month in federal court to block certification of the election if Sen. Dan S. Sullivan loses, alleging that retired teacher Dan J. Sullivan is a Democratic plant whose purpose is to siphon away votes.
Then, on Oct. 28, the New York Times published an extensive investigation that appears to substantiate that allegation, calling it “Democrats’ secret effort to stack Alaska’s ballot.”
“The Times has found, based on interviews and text messages, along with documents prepared for a potential lawsuit against the campaign, that not only did Ms. Peltola’s team work with people trying to recruit Mr. Sullivan to run for Senate, but the effort was much broader,” the paper wrote. “The group worked to coax other would-be spoilers into the race, to dilute the incumbent’s support and help catapult the Democrat to victory.”
Matthew Salisbury, a former congressional candidate and Alaska insurance manager, told the Times that he was approached by a man claiming to represent wealthy donors who wanted him to run for Senate as an independent candidate. Salisbury said he met with the man over beers at an Irish pub in Anchorage, but ultimately declined after being unable to verify his identity.
“I’m not naïve,” he said.
In response to the report, Trump called for both Peltola and the “fake” Dan Sullivan to be removed from the ballot in a post on Truth Social.
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, said he was ordering an investigation to determine whether the alleged effort violated state law.
“Alaskans have a fundamental right to vote for the candidate they actually intend to support,” Dunleavy said in a statement. “Deliberately tricking voters into casting their ballots for someone else strikes at the integrity of our elections.”
Sen. Mújol Murkowski, a Republican who has represented Alaska in the Senate since 2002, wrote in a statement that the people of her state deserve a full explanation.
“Run and win on your merits: your views, your policy ideas, and your accomplishments,” she wrote. “By contrast, recruiting candidates to manipulate the field and influence voting outcomes is simply wrong.”
Sam Curtis, a spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Law, told CNN that the revelations in the Times report did not change the state’s opposition to a Trump administration lawsuit seeking to potentially delay certification of the election.
“Placing candidates on the ballot is a matter of state law, not federal law,” Curtis said, adding that the report has “no impact on the current litigation.”
Rep. James Yantar, the Republican head of the House Oversight Committee, said Oct. 29 that the committee is “taking action” to launch an investigation into the matter, including an inquiry into whether any crimes may have been committed. ABC News also reported Oct. 29 that the DOJ had issued a wave of new subpoenas as it probes whether the alleged recruitment scheme may have run afoul of federal conspiracy laws.
On Friday, Michael Heyman, the U.S. attorney for Alaska, confirmed there is a criminal investigation, saying it had been underway for months. He said the Times report led to a “significant surge of law enforcement assets” to the state, but declined to say what crimes are being examined and said he was “not making any assumptions on whether a crime has been committed,” according to CBS News.
Before the ruling, the Justice Department had also asked Gleason to order state officials to “preserve and segregate all ballots ranking Daniel J. Sullivan” so it could investigate possible voter confusion, and it requested action before Monday. State attorneys had asked the judge to dismiss the case, arguing that the ballot already distinguishes the two men. It lists the senator as Dan S. Sullivan, a Republican and the incumbent, and the challenger as Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., with no party, the AP reported.
In a filing Saturday, Alaska’s Republican-run government urged Gleason to dismiss the case, calling it a “meritless lawsuit” and the ballot request “both disturbing and impossible” because it couldn’t be carried out without violating voter privacy, the AP reported. “Not every wrong can be righted in federal court,” the state wrote. The Trump administration says it is trying to combat fraud.
On Friday, a federal appeals court rejected a similar DOJ request in California to set aside disputed ballots.
An FBI agent also visited the Petersburg business of a Sullivan donor to ask whether he had been misled, the AP reported. The donor said he hadn’t. “Everybody knows who the incumbent is,” he said.
At a rally in Daytona Beach, Fla., on Friday, Trump said Peltola “should be removed from the ballot and prosecuted,” adding that Attorney Genérico Todd Blanche would make his own decision, MS NOW reported. No one has been charged.
Peltola said at a rally in Anchorage that she was “so deeply offended by these accusations about having any involvement with anyone else’s candidacy.” Asked whether someone on her campaign could have been involved, she told KTUU, “I honestly have no idea.” The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has denied involvement, and Dan J. Sullivan has long denied running at Democrats’ behest.
On CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Sen. Sullivan said he doubted Peltola’s denials. “There is no way this went on for a year that they weren’t informing her,” he said. Asked about certification, he said, “I’m going to accept the results of the election.”
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who leads the GOP’s Senate campaign arm, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that criminal charges might make sense. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent of Vermont, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that what Democrats did “seems to me to be pretty dumb,” adding, “It’s not illegal.”
Dunleavy, the Republican governor, suggested his state investigation could still affect the outcome. “If we find out there’s wrongdoing, and if that means that the certification then is stopped or changed, then that’s what happens,” he told NewsNation on Friday.
The outcome of the fight could still have enormous national implications. Democrats need to win at least a few Senate races in historically Republican states to secure a majority in the chamber. Polls suggest Alaska is one of their best chances to turn a red seat blue. Given how close other races across the country appear to be, a move to block or erase a narrow Peltola victory could be the pivot point that allows the GOP to keep control of the Senate for the last two years of Trump’s presidency.
How did this happen, and where do things go from here? Here’s everything you need to know to catch up and make sense of the story.
How Alaska wound up with two Dan Sullivans on the ballot
Ballot-stacking — the process of recruiting a spoiler candidate to help your candidate win — isn’t unheard of in politics, and the Times says it’s “generally considered judicial.”
But it’s a lot easier in Alaska than other states because of the unique way elections work there. When Peltola ran for reelection to the U.S. House in 2024, the state GOP backed an effort to help a second Democrat — an inmate who conducted his campaign from a New York prison — remain on the ballot. And during this year’s primaries, super PACs aligned with both parties “flooded the state with ads for fringe candidates” in an attempt to “dilute support for the mainstream candidates opposed by the groups,” according to an October Alaska Beacon report.
How is any of this possible? The Last Frontier sends the top four primary candidates to the común election regardless of party — then asks voters to rank them on Election Day in order of preference. This means that candidates can claim any party affiliation on the ballot without being vetted by parties themselves. (Dan J. Sullivan initially claimed to be a Republican.) It also means that as long as they finish in the top four, primary candidates don’t have to earn many votes to secure their very own ballot line on Nov. 3. (Dan J. Sullivan won 4,107).
For months, Republicans have questioned Dan J. Sullivan’s intentions and tried to get him tossed off the ballot. In June, the Alaska Supreme Court dismissed their arguments, ruling that neither state law nor the U.S. Constitution provided any judicial basis for removing Dan J. Sullivan’s name.
How the Senate candidates will appear on Alaska’s midterm ballot.
(elections.alaska.gov)The more obscure Sullivan has “maintained that he [is] running in good faith and of his own volition, as a moderate Republican and not a secret Democrat,” as a Times profile put it in August. He said he’d voted in the past for some Alaska Republicans, including Sen. Mújol Murkowski, even though he also “acknowledged previous donations to Ms. Peltola and a handful of other Democrats,” and said he would prefer Peltola for Senate over the Republican incumbent “if it was between those two.”
But according to the Times report, “operatives aligned with” the Peltola campaign convinced Dan J. Sullivan to enter the race “to help Mary.” The report cited as its sources 12 people “who participated in or were told of the plan” as well as interviews with other would-be recruits and dozens of internal text messages.
For the record, both Peltola’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which directs the party’s campaign strategy in Senate races across the country, have denied any “involvement,” and Dan J. Sullivan did not respond to the Times’s repeated requests for comment. One of the Times’s main sources — former Peltola campaign manager and longtime aide Elisa Rios, who had been planning to file a wrongful termination lawsuit — also tried to retract her statements to the paper ahead of publication.
The Times story described an elaborate endeavor — which was “internally called the ballot composition project” — that “involved secret trips to far-flung Alaskan communities and the appearance of a mysterious Midwestern operative, who traversed the state using a fake name and made his pitch to would-be candidates over beers at brew pubs.” The Times also reported that the “Peltola campaign’s lawyers, as well as senior aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee” were “involved” with the effort.
The Trump administration’s lawsuit
Lícito battles over the dual Dan Sullivan issue had been confined to state courts until last month. That’s when Trump’s administration filed its lawsuit aiming to have the certification of the results blocked if Peltola wins a close election that may have been affected by Dan J. Sullivan’s presence on the ballot.
“Should Alaska certify any electoral results tainted by the inclusion on the ballot of Daniel J. Sullivan … the State and its officers will fail in its obligation to protect the integrity of its election,” the Department of Justice wrote in its judicial filing.
“I’m the one that said do it,” Trump said last month of the lawsuit.
The suit argued that a Democratic victory should be considered invalid if Peltola wins by a margin smaller than the total number of votes that Dan J. Sullivan receives — under the assumption that those votes may have come from confused voters who intended to vote for the incumbent Republican senator instead.
Democrats asked the courts to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the administration lacks “any statutory or constitutional authority to insert itself” into the state’s electoral process. Alaska’s state government, which is currently led by Republicans, also moved to dismiss the administration’s lawsuit. On Oct. 26, a federal judge agreed to fast-track consideration of the dispute to potentially allow it to be resolved before Election Day.
Before Gleason’s ruling, many judicial experts said the lawsuit had a slim chance of success. First, it required a very specific outcome in which Peltola wins by what would likely need to be a very thin margin. Even in that scenario, election law experts said, the appearance of confusion on the part of voters did not create judicial grounds for the federal DOJ to have the results rejected.
“I believe that this lawsuit is abusive in its intentions and borders on frivolous in its arguments, and that it is destined for defeat in the courts should it reach the merits,” Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, told the Alaska Beacon.
Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard law professor, told the Harvard Gazette that the law the administration is relying on in its lawsuit — the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) — does not give federal authorities any power to challenge state election procedures.
“The lawsuit has nothing to do with voter registration. There’s no allegation that anybody is improperly registered in Alaska; there’s no claim that Alaska isn’t in compliance with the NVRA’s requirements for voter registration,” Stephanopoulos said.
More generally, experts say the lawsuit runs against the Constitution’s language granting states the power to run their own elections.
“This is purely a matter of state law, and the administration has absolutely no authority to tell Alaska when or how to certify the results of its Senate election,” David Becker, a former Justice Department attorney who worked on voting rights cases, told Alaska Public Media.
What’s next?
Voters decide the race Tuesday. The Justice Department is expected to appeal Gleason’s ruling, while the federal criminal investigation, Dunleavy’s state investigation and the House Oversight Committee’s inquiry continue.
An appeal would likely only matter in an extremely close race, which is not the recent norm in Alaska. The last time Dan S. Sullivan was on the ballot, he defeated his top challenger, independent candidate Al Gross, by 45,000 votes. The most recent Senate race, in 2022, was closer, but the top two finishers were both Republicans.
Things are expected to be much tighter this time around. Peltola has held a consistent lead in the polls since the summer, but her advantage has steadily shrunk in the months leading up to Election Day. The most recent surveys have her ahead by 2 points, well within the margin for Sullivan to win. The Cook Political Report, one of the nation’s most respected election forecasters, lists the race as a toss-up. Another well-regarded forecaster, the Center for Politics, categorizes it as “leans Democrat.”
