A federal judge in Alaska has thrown out the Trump administration’s lawsuit seeking to block certification of the state’s Senate election results in this week’s midterm elections if the Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan loses.
U.S. District Judge Sharon L. Gleason wrote in a 20-page order Sunday that the Justice Department did not have proper legal standing to bring the suit last week. The suit asked Gleason to block the state’s election results from being certified because a teacher named Daniel J. Sullivan is also on the state’s ballot, alleging that his candidacy deliberately sought to confuse voters by running with the same ballot name and party affiliation as the state’s incumbent senator.
The Justice Department argued that Daniel J. Sullivan’s name on the ballot potentially diverted voters, and the Democrat running in the race, Mary Peltola, would benefit as a result.
Gleason said she could not grant the injunction that the Trump administration sought “because the United States has failed to establish the redressability prerequisite for Article III standing.”
“More fundamentally, the United States provides no workable plan as to how it proposes to segregate ballots cast for Daniel J. Sullivan on Election Day and then conduct a court-ordered unspecified ‘investigation’ of those ballots in a manner that would preserve voter secrecy,” Gleason wrote, adding that the Justice Department “failed to satisfy its burden to show that its alleged injury is redressable by a court order.”
The Justice Department filed a notice of appeal on Sunday.
Earlier, a DOJ spokesperson told CBS News that the federal judge dismissed the case on procedural grounds “but did not dispute the argument of the United States that Daniel J. Sullivan (a/k/a Decoy Dan) entered the race as a frivolous candidate to confuse voters.
“Alaskan voters deserve a fair election, not to be misled in an attempt to rig outcomes,” the spokesperson said.
The suit, which argues Sullivan’s candidacy violates the National Voter Registration Act, was amended on Thursday to include recent reporting by The New York Times on alleged efforts by people associated with Peltola’s campaign to find candidates who could draw votes away from the Republican senator. It included a second claim for relief, arguing the court needs to intervene under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause in order to allow the government to enforce the law and prevent a “conspiracy.”
Peltola’s campaign responded to the Times story by saying the campaign “has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign.”
“I am not interested in tricking voters,” Peltola said during a recent campaign event.
Sen. Sullivan on Sunday told CNN’s “State of the Union” that he thought the presence of a second Sullivan on the ballot would impact the election, saying: “I’m sure I’m going to lose a lot of votes to that trickery.”
He also said he doubted Peltola’s claims that she had no idea her top political aides were involved in recruiting Dan J. Sullivan to run as a way to confuse voters.
“There is no way this went on for a year that they weren’t informing her,” Sullivan said. “She got caught lying, and she’s still lying to the Alaskan people, the media, to all of us.”
In addition to the civil lawsuit, the Justice Department is also criminally investigating an alleged plot to add Daniel J. Sullivan to the state’s ballot and has issued subpoenas targeting several Democratic officials believed to be tied to the effort to recruit him to appear on Alaska’s ballot. Nobody in the race has been charged with a crime.
