Justice Department asks court to halt certification in a narrow Alaska Senate loss

Snow-covered Alaska State Capitol in Juneau, where state officials oversee the election process; archival photograph from 2021. — James Brooks, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; cropped to 16:9

Summary

DOJ filed suit October 22 seeking a conditional halt to certification of Alaska’s U.S. Senate result, not an across-the-board suspension of the election.
The condition requires Sen. Dan S. Sullivan to lose and a hypothetical reassignment of votes for Daniel J. Sullivan to change the winner under ranked-choice tabulation.
Alaska courts previously restored Daniel J. Sullivan to the ballot; claims that he intended to mislead voters are contested allegations.

A pre-election challenge to certification

The U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit in federal court in Anchorage on October 22 asking a judge to prevent Alaska from certifying the result of its U.S. Senate election under a narrowly defined circumstance. Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan is seeking another term against Democrat Mary Peltola. A second candidate, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. of Petersburg, is also on the November 3 ballot. The government argues that their similar names could cause some voters intending to support the incumbent to choose the other Sullivan instead. That claim has not been established by a court in this case.^{[1] [2]}

The complaint does not seek to cancel the vote or automatically stop certification whenever the incumbent loses. It defines a potentially affected result as one in which Sen. Sullivan does not win and would have won if every vote cast for Daniel J. Sullivan had instead gone to him, with Alaska’s ranked-choice count then rerun accordingly. In that circumstance, DOJ seeks a halt to certification while an investigation determines whether votes for the other Sullivan were actually intended for the senator, along with any further court-ordered remedy. The requested injunction is a proposed remedy, not an order already granted.^[1]

How the names reached the same ballot

Alaska’s elections director initially found in June that Daniel J. Sullivan’s candidacy had been filed to confuse or mislead voters and excluded him. He challenged that decision; a state court ordered him restored, and the Alaska Supreme Court affirmed the result. The federal complaint relies on the director’s earlier findings even though the state courts did not allow his exclusion. Daniel J. Sullivan has denied that he entered the race to deceive voters or coordinated with Democrats. On the general-election ballot, the incumbent is identified as a Republican, while the Petersburg candidate appears without a party designation, according to the Associated Press.^{[1] [2] [3]}

Alaska uses a top-four primary followed by ranked-choice voting in the general election. Voters may rank more than one candidate, and if their first choice is eliminated, their vote can move to their next ranked choice. That feature complicates a simple vote-splitting account: ballots marking the two Sullivans in succession can transfer between them, while ballots with different or no later rankings behave differently. Whether any voters were confused, how many, and whether that would change the outcome cannot be known from the candidates’ names alone.^{[4] [1] [2]}

The legal question ahead

DOJ invokes the National Voter Registration Act’s stated purpose of protecting the integrity of elections and its provision permitting the attorney general to seek relief to carry out that law. Its suit alleges that certifying a result affected by the second candidacy would breach Alaska officials’ duties. The Washington Post reported that legal experts questioned this novel use of a voter-registration statute; Notre Dame election-law professor Derek Muller told the Associated Press the statute does not authorize DOJ to enjoin certification. Those assessments are legal opinions, and the federal court has yet to decide the claim.^{[1] [2] [3]}

The immediate question is therefore whether the court will entertain this pre-election theory, not whether Alaska’s election has already been invalidated. A Sullivan victory, or a loss outside the complaint’s mathematical condition, would not meet the scenario for which DOJ seeks to pause certification. The case could matter most if the final ranked-choice result is close enough for the hypothetical transfer to reverse it, but the actual votes and any judicial response are still ahead.^{[1] [2] [4]}

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