The Justice Department is asking a federal judge to prevent Alaska from certifying its U.S. Senate election results under certain circumstances if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, who has held the seat since 2015, loses.

In a complaint filed October 22, detailed in a court filing submitted on Thursday, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward argued that the presence of a second candidate named "Dan Sullivan" in the race gives grounds to pause and reconsider the election. Federal attorneys allege that Daniel J. Sullivan entered the race to confuse supporters of the incumbent and help Democratic challenger and former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola win.

The government asks the court to block certification — the formal step in which state officials validate vote counts and make results official — if the incumbent loses but would have won had ballots cast for the other Sullivan been cast for him instead.

The complaint alleges that Daniel J. Sullivan requested the ballot name "Dan Sullivan" and switched his affiliation to Republican shortly before filing, and that his campaign website resembles the senator's. An attached letter from Alaska Elections Director Carol Beecher adds that he initially requested "Dan S. Sullivan" — using the incumbent's middle initial rather than his own.

Beecher has said since June that the other Sullivan announced his candidacy intentionally to cause confusion, and his was removed from the ballot. Alaska courts reversed that decision, however: a trial court found the exclusion erroneous, and the Alaska Supreme Court affirmed. The federal complaint nonetheless relies heavily on Beecher's rejected determination.

The lawsuit names Alaska, its elections director, and state election boards as defendants, and invokes the election-integrity purpose of the National Voter Registration Act, the 1993 federal law commonly known as the Motor Voter Act, as the basis for federal intervention.

According to the DOJ's filing, Peltola received 49.5 percent of the vote in the primary, the incumbent Sullivan received 41.4 percent, and Daniel J. Sullivan received 2.5 percent. Republican Gerald Heikes also advanced. With the GOP expecting a close race, confusion over the two Dan Sullivans could decide the outcome.

Alaska voters approved ranked-choice voting through a ballot measure in 2020 and first used it in the 2022 election; the state also used it in the 2024 general election, when Trump was elected. Under that system, a candidate must win a majority of the vote to prevail; if no candidate crosses that threshold in the first round of tabulation, the last-place finisher is eliminated and those ballots are reallocated to the remaining candidates according to voters' next choices.

The government is not simply asking the court to remove the challenger. Instead, it seeks an order preventing certification of any outcome that meets its hypothetical test, pending investigation and further judicial relief. The federal complaint was filed in U.S. court, where the request now awaits a judge's ruling.

"And the efforts by Trump to stop certification of election results they don't like has begun," Bulwark reporter Sam Stein wrote Friday on X. "DOJ now seeking to block Alaska Senate results if Peltola wins and the other Dan Sullivan gets votes[.]"

Source: Alternet