Donald Trump says he ordered the Department of Justice to sue the state of Alaska in an effort to block the results of a U.S. Senate election from being certified, unless the incumbent Republican wins.
Government attorneys filed a lawsuit Friday arguing that the presence of Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. on the ballot would confuse voters who support the sitting senator, Daniel S. Sullivan, in the unusual matchup of two candidates with the same name up against a Democratic candidate.
“I’m the one that said do it,” Trump told reporters Friday. “They have two Dan Sullivans.”
Trump’s admission of an extraordinary intervention in the nation’s elections follows the president’s threats to overhaul election administration and assert federal control before critical midterm elections with the balance of power in Congress, and fate of his final years in office, at stake.
Voters might “inadvertently vote” for the wrong candidate, according to the Justice Department. “To guard against this danger, it is vital that Defendants not certify any election result that may be impacted by voter confusion,” government attorneys wrote in court filings on Friday.
That “voter confusion” could tilt the election in favor of the Democratic nominee, Mary Peltola, thanks to Dan J. Sullivan’s “frivolous” campaign, according to the Justice Department.
Recent polling suggests the Republican incumbent is neck and neck with Peltola, a former Democratic congresswoman.
The Trump administration is seeking a court order that would prevent the state from certifying results if “Senator Sullivan does not win the election,” claiming that “had all votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan been cast instead for Senator Sullivan and Alaska’s rank-choice process played out accordingly, Senator Sullivan would have won the election.”
“The Democrats put up a guy,” Trump told reporters Friday. “I don’t think he ever voted before. All of a sudden he decides to run.”
The lawsuit was filed one day after Attorney General Todd Blanche said he would not rule out dispatching the Justice Department to block states from certifying election results.
“Yes, of course there’s scenarios we could all come up with, hypothetically — some ‘doomsday’ scenario, for example,” he told reporters Thursday. “I don’t think it’s proper to make any kind of conclusory statements about what could happen in the future.”
While it’s “never” the Justice Department’s intention to “improperly interfere with elections or the state confirmation process or certification process,” he told reporters, “to say that there’s no circumstances that we would ever do that, of course, I’m not going to say that,” he said.
“But am I planning my days around the election to be somewhere to not certify? Of course not,” he added.
Days earlier, Blanche — the president’s former criminal defense lawyer — stated that he “works for President Trump.”
“There was this misperception that there’s this separation and independence between the Department of Justice and the White House, and everybody likes to champion that, and they accused me of not suffering from independence,” he told The New York Post’s podcast. “I don’t.”
David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit group Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the lawsuit “represents an unprecedented intervention by the federal government.”
“This is purely a matter of state law, and the administration has absolutely no authority to tell Alaska when or how to certify the results of its Senate election,” he said in a statement.
"The DOJ attempting to intervene at this late stage is entirely against department policy, as there is no legitimate enforcement of federal law here, and it raises serious concerns about political interference,” he added. “I cannot recall an administration ever attempting to stop the certification of an election — and certainly not 11 days before polls close.”
Former Alaska state elections attorney Libby Bakalar called the government’s argument “laughably bad, almost to the point of sanctionably frivolous,” while Notre Dame Law School election law professor Derek Muller called the argument “one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen.”
The issue has also already been litigated in Alaska’s courts.
In June, the Alaska Division of Elections removed Dan J. Sullivan from primary ballots, saying his candidacy was “for the purpose of confusing or misleading voters.”
But he appealed that decision, and an Anchorage Superior Court judge overturned the lower court. The argument that his candidacy is designed to “confuse or misguide voters is not supported by a preponderance of evidence,” Judge Thomas Matthews in a 32-page analysis.
The state appealed, but the decision was upheld, and the state did not seek an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the primary, Peltola finished first with 49.5 percent of the vote, followed by Dan S. Sullivan with 41.4 percent and Dan J. Sullivan with 2.5 percent.
Harry Child, a spokesperson for Alaskans for Mary, called the lawsuit a “despicable political threat to overturn an election.”
According to the campaign, the lawsuit was “designed by Senator Dan Sullivan’s allies to suppress the voices of Alaskans because Sullivan is terrified he’ll lose the seat that has allowed him to enrich himself at Alaskans’ expense for over a decade,” Child told The Independent.
A spokesperson for Senator Sullivan’s campaign said they will “let the DOJ complaint run its course.”
“Alaskans can tell the difference between a Democrat sideshow and Senator Sullivan’s strong record of delivering for Alaska, a record he’ll keep building on for the next six years,” campaign spokesman: Nate Adams told The Independent.
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