Lawsuit seeks to block certification in race that could decide Senate control
The state of Alaska and the Justice Department have each opened criminal investigations into whether anyone broke the law in the effort to put a second Dan Sullivan on the ballot in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race. The probes add a criminal track to a Justice Department civil suit seeking to block state officials from certifying the election results if incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan loses and votes cast for his namesake, Dan J. Sullivan Jr., are sufficient to potentially change the outcome.
The contest sits at the center of the fight for control of the Senate, and Republicans have spent weeks fighting — so far unsuccessfully — to keep the second Sullivan, a fishing-village retiree, off the ballot. The inquiries have put the Democratic candidate, Mary Peltola, and her party on the defensive ahead of Election Day.
Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy ordered the state investigation after the New York Times reported that there was an organized Democratic effort to recruit the second Sullivan. The governor promised a “thorough and by the book” probe but said it may not be wrapped up before Election Day.
The Justice Department, meanwhile, sent out a new batch of subpoenas on Thursday and is exploring a theory that people involved in the effort willfully violated the civil rights of voters by confusing them, officials familiar with the probe said. Investigators could rely on a statute, historically used to prosecute police officers for using excessive force, that targets rights violations by people acting in their official capacities. Even a fast-moving probe takes time, and it is difficult to charge people overnight, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Some legal observers are dubious of the Justice Department’s strategy. There are no federal laws that bar the practice of ballot stacking in general, said Michael Kang, a Northwestern University law professor, who added that if all Democrats did was seek spoiler candidates, even ones with the same name as an incumbent, “I don’t really see any kind of violation of law there.” “It’s less than clear that the conduct that has been reported would violate any provision of Alaska law,” said Jeff Feldman, a University of Washington law professor. A criminal case could be more straightforward, legal observers said, if investigators find that someone involved in the alleged scheme lied in official documents or in response to law-enforcement inquiries.
Keeping Dan J. Sullivan off the ballot has so far failed in court. The Alaska Republican Party tried unsuccessfully to remove him in the primary, and the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that both Sullivans could appear. Both candidates are listed with middle initials, and the incumbent senator’s party affiliation appears next to his name.
Dan J. Sullivan has told The Wall Street Journal that nobody put him up to running.
Peltola on Thursday denied that she knew about an effort to put a second Dan Sullivan on the ballot, the Associated Press reported. “I am not interested in tricking voters,” Peltola said during remarks in a bar in Juneau.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said it was not involved with the second Sullivan’s candidacy. “Republicans have a long history of recruiting and propping up candidates in an attempt to boost their own campaigns,” the committee said. In court, its lawyers argue that the Justice Department is using the controversy to distract from its own “open effort to interfere with the certification of a potential loss by the president’s favored U.S. Senate candidate.”
The litigation is moving quickly. The Justice Department sued Alaska state officials on Oct. 22 to block them from certifying the results if Sen. Sullivan loses his re-election bid and the votes cast for Dan J. Sullivan Jr. are sufficient to potentially change the outcome. The Peltola campaign, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and voting-rights groups have intervened to seek dismissal of the Trump administration’s effort, each arguing that the administration has no constitutional authority to interfere with how the state runs its election.
On Thursday the administration filed an amended complaint referencing the New York Times report, with broadly similar legal arguments. U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason, an appointee of President Obama, could issue a ruling in the next few days.
Republicans who run elections in Alaska are fighting the Justice Department’s lawsuit, signaling they want to certify the Senate results based on the final vote tallies. Dunleavy, however, has suggested he may not go along. “If we conclude that there were things that should not have happened, let me put it that way, that are illegal, we will act on that. And that may, in fact, impact whether somebody is seated in the U.S. Senate,” the governor said Thursday in a NewsNation interview.
If Dunleavy were to refuse to sign off on certification, a court could order him to do so or allow someone else to sign in his place, said Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor. Peltola would then have a certificate of election to take to Washington “that’s treated like an admission ticket,” Muller said. If Senate Republicans then attempted to refuse her admission, it could set off a complicated fight with little modern precedent.
Same-name tactics are an old play in both parties. In a 1998 U.S. House race in Georgia, Republicans ran a man named John H. Lewis Sr. against Rep. John Lewis, the civil-rights leader and longtime Democratic incumbent, who won in a landslide. In 2022, Pennsylvania voters faced similar name confusion when a Republican candidate named Mike Doyle ran for the seat that Democratic Rep. Mike Doyle was retiring from; the new Doyle lost to Rep. Summer Lee.
Sometimes such efforts have led to legal trouble. In a 1930 Nebraska Republican primary, some in the party sought to recruit a same-named spoiler to weaken incumbent Sen. George W. Norris and landed on a grocer named George W. Norris. The second Norris ultimately didn’t make the ballot. He was later sentenced to three months in prison and fined $100 for perjury after lying to a U.S. Senate committee about who funded his campaign.