I don’t think Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. ended up on Alaska’s Senate ballot by accident. A retired teacher from Petersburg with the same name as the sitting senator files to run, gets listed without his party, and the state’s own Division of Elections tries to throw him off because it thinks the point is to confuse voters. That smells. I’d say so to anyone who asked.
So I came to the Justice Department’s lawsuit ready to give it a fair hearing. It filed in federal court in Alaska on October 22, asking that the state be stopped from certifying the Senate result if Senator Dan Sullivan loses by fewer votes than his namesake collects, until someone investigates whether those votes were meant for the senator. President Trump says he told the department to file it.
The lawsuit is wrong.
Not a little early. Not merely clumsy. Wrong.
Who already decided this?
Start with the obvious question. Who gets to decide whether a candidate belongs on Alaska’s ballot? Alaska does. Election officials did try to disqualify Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. State courts overturned them, and in June the Alaska Supreme Court ordered him kept on the ballot. That is how the system is meant to work. A state agency made a call, the candidate went to court, and the state’s highest court ruled under the state’s own law.
The department’s answer is the National Voter Registration Act, specifically the part of it that lists the law’s purposes, one of which is the integrity of the electoral process. A statement of purpose isn’t a power. Derek Muller, an election law professor at Notre Dame, put it plainly: the statute doesn’t let the Justice Department block certification. Walter Olson at the libertarian Cato Institute called the suit close to frivolous. When the small-government right won’t defend a federal power grab over state elections, the theory is in trouble.
What would a confused voter actually see?
The second test is simpler. Look at the ballot. Alaska’s sample ballot lists the senator as “Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican) Incumbent.” The other man appears as “Sullivan, Daniel J Jr” with no party at all. A voter who wants the senator is looking for the word incumbent, and it’s right there.
Then there’s ranked-choice voting, which plenty of Alaska Republicans tried to repeal and which now happens to be the best protection the senator has. A voter who marks the wrong Sullivan first and the right one second doesn’t lose that vote. When the namesake is eliminated, it moves. In the primary he took about 2.5 percent. Mary Peltola, the Democrat, took about 49.5 and Sullivan about 41. The race is a real toss-up. The namesake is a rounding problem the ballot design already handles.
And the timing gives the game away. These claims could have been brought in June, when the Alaska Supreme Court ruled. They arrived twelve days before a November 3 election, aimed only at the outcome where the Republican loses. A suit that only matters if your candidate is behind is a suit about the count.
What I still won’t concede
I’m not going to pretend the namesake candidacy is innocent because the remedy is bad. If someone recruited Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. to split the vote, that deserves to come out, and Peltola’s campaign says it had nothing to do with him. Fine. Let reporters and the state find out. Attorney General Todd Blanche says the suit isn’t a setup to challenge the midterm result. Then he can drop the part that freezes certification.
Courts after 2020 refused to let a lawsuit stand in for the voters. They should say the same thing in Anchorage.
Count the ballots. Then argue.