Justice Department Seeks to Halt Alaska Senate Certification if Dan Sullivan Loses

Ahmed Kamel – Egypt Daily News

World

The U.S. Justice Department has filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent Alaska from certifying the results of its November Senate election if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses and a court finds that votes for another candidate with a similar name may have affected the outcome.

The suit targets Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.’s presence on the ballot, arguing that voters intending to support Senator Dan S. Sullivan could mistakenly choose the other candidate. The department is asking a federal court to intervene if the senator loses and the result was affected by that confusion. Rather than simply seeking to remove the second candidate from the ballot, the lawsuit asks the court to block certification under specified circumstances.

The case has drawn attention because state and local officials administer elections, while federal authority to challenge election procedures is limited. The Justice Department invokes the National Voter Registration Act, arguing that its commitment to protecting electoral integrity supports federal intervention. But whether the law permits the department to challenge certification based on potential voter confusion is disputed. Election law professor Derek Muller has described the legal theory as unusual and questioned whether a court could grant the relief sought.

The dispute turns on both the possibility of mistaken votes and whether any such confusion could be measured after ballots are cast. The department argues that voters might select Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. when they mean to vote for the incumbent. In Alaska’s ranked-choice system, that could matter if the contest proceeds through multiple rounds, as votes for eliminated candidates may be transferred according to voters’ next-ranked choices.

Under the system, voters may rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and those ballots are counted for the next-ranked eligible candidate. The process continues until a candidate wins. A voter unsure about the two Sullivans could rank both, potentially allowing a ballot to transfer to the incumbent if the other candidate is eliminated. The Justice Department’s lawsuit argues, however, that some voters might not rank the incumbent or might rank the other Sullivan higher.

The ballot distinguishes the candidates. Dan S. Sullivan is identified as the incumbent and as a registered Republican. Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. appears without a party affiliation. His placement on the ballot followed a legal dispute: Alaska election officials had removed him, but the state Supreme Court ruled that he should be included. Muller said election officials took steps to reduce the potential for confusion, including using the candidates’ middle initials and identifying the incumbent.

The dispute has become a political flashpoint in a closely watched race between Senator Sullivan and Democrat Mary Peltola. President Donald Trump has publicly criticized the second Sullivan’s candidacy and suggested his administration would pursue legal action. Trump has described the presence of two candidates with similar names as a scheme to confuse voters. Those claims have not been established as fact by a court.

The Justice Department is asking the court to declare certification unlawful if voter confusion affected the result and to delay certification while officials investigate whether voters who intended to support the incumbent cast ballots for someone else. That request raises a practical difficulty: ballots are secret, and once counted together, they may not reveal which voters selected one Sullivan when they meant to choose the other. Muller has questioned how an investigation could reliably identify voter intent after the election.

The lawsuit therefore puts two concerns in tension: protecting voters from possible ballot confusion and respecting Alaska’s authority to administer and certify its elections. The court will have to consider whether federal law authorizes the intervention, what evidence could show that confusion changed the outcome, and whether a post-election inquiry could answer those questions while preserving ballot secrecy.

With the election approaching, the case adds uncertainty to an already contentious contest. Whatever the court decides, the lawsuit is likely to intensify debate over the federal government’s role in state election administration and over what evidence is needed to show that an election result does not reflect voters’ intentions.

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