The Justice Department sues Alaska on a frivolous legal theory

By Adele Rutherford · Reporting from Atlanta · October 24, 2026

By filing a baseless lawsuit to halt certification in Alaska's Senate race, the Justice Department abuses federal power to shield a partisan candidate from state election rules.

A frivolous theory built to catch votes, not win arguments

There is a proper way to lose an election, and there is a proper way to file a lawsuit. Neither involves asking a federal judge to rewrite the rules of arithmetic because you are afraid of the ballot box. On October 22, 2026, the United States Justice Department filed a federal lawsuit in Alaska. It seeks to preemptively block the certification of the state’s Senate election if Republican incumbent Dan S. Sullivan loses to Democratic nominee Mary Peltola. NBC News, The Guardian, CNN, The Washington Post, and the BBC reported the challenge. The administration argues that the presence of a second candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan—a retired schoolteacher and former U.S. Forest Service worker from Petersburg, Alaska—will cause voter confusion and undermine electoral integrity. Donald Trump told reporters on Friday, "I'm the one that said do it." The complaint cites the preamble of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act. That statutory throat-clearing merely mentions protecting the integrity of the electoral process.

That is not a legal argument. That is a prayer dressed up in a pleading. Building a case on the preamble of a registration statute while ignoring the actual provisions of the law cannot stand. It is like suing the government for money because the Declaration of Independence guarantees life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Chris Shenton, a lawyer at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, rightly observed that the analogy holds. Both invoke lofty introductory sentiments to conjure a nonexistent cause of action. Derek Mueller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, noted that the legal claim is absurdly thin. He found essentially no likelihood of success. The Alaska Supreme Court ruled in June that Dan J. Sullivan could remain on the ballot. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, called the lawsuit an unprecedented intervention by the federal government. He noted he could not recall an administration ever attempting to stop the certification of an election eleven days before polls close. When the executive branch deploys the Department of Justice to rescue a lagging partisan candidate from a choice the state supreme court already protected, it is not enforcing federal law. It is subverting the machinery of state self-government.

The 2020 United States presidential election showed us this playbook before

We have seen this script played on a grander stage, and we know how the machinery jams. The 2020 United States presidential election ended with an incumbent president challenging the legitimacy of certified outcomes across multiple jurisdictions using extraordinary legal levers. The shared mechanism here is plain: the use of executive power to challenge the legitimacy of election results to prevent the transfer of power to a political opponent. In Alaska today, the scale is smaller, but the constitutional strain is identical. The temptation to draft federal courts into the service of partisan election disputes is a recurring hazard of our politics. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward signed this complaint, stepping far outside the traditional portfolio of his office, as CNN reported. He did what career lawyers refused to do. He provided the signature for a filing that lacks a colorable legal basis.

The administration’s grievance is not really with the second Sullivan. It is with ranked-choice voting, which Alaska adopted in 2020 and which Donald Trump has described as a scam. Trump held a rally at the Curtis D Menard Memorial Sports Center in Wasilla to encourage support for a ballot measure to repeal it. The November 3 ballot lists the incumbent as Registered Republican Incumbent. The election will proceed under rules the state enacted for itself. Alaskans know who is on their ballot. Republican U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski wrote that Alaskans don't need any help voting for their preferred candidates. The state of Alaska has already handled this by clearly distinguishing the candidates on this year’s ballot. She added that the Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit. When even members of the incumbent’s own party recognize a federal overreach, it is worth asking whether the rule of law is being applied or merely weaponized. A rule that only works while your people hold power was never a rule at all.

Legitimacy is a capital stock that spends fast and refills slowly

The danger of this litigation is not that it will succeed. Courts do not typically invent jurisdiction out of statutory preambles to halt state counts eleven days before a vote. The danger is what the filing costs the institution that brings it. Legitimacy is a capital stock that spends fast and refills slowly. Every time the Department of Justice is turned into a campaign committee adjunct, its credibility in routine prosecutions and civil enforcement drops another notch. Mary Peltola called the lawsuit a distraction and corruption. She called it a desperate attempt to cling to power using allies in Washington to rig the system further. She is right about the desperation, even if the machinery of federal court practice will likely dispose of the matter with dispatch.

We judge the process, not the score. If an administration of the opposite party tomorrow decided to sue to block a congressional certification because a minor third-party candidate shared a name with their preferred contender, conservatives would rightly denounce it as lawless interference. The test of a legal theory is whether you can bear the sight of your opponents holding the tool. The Department of Justice has no business inserting itself into a local candidate-naming dispute that the Alaska courts settled months ago. The federal district court in Alaska should dismiss this complaint with prejudice. The attorneys who signed it should be held to account under Rule 11 for bringing a federal action that treats a statute's preamble as a blank check for executive interference.

The Justice Department sues Alaska on a frivolous legal theory

A frivolous theory built to catch votes, not win arguments

The 2020 United States presidential election showed us this playbook before

Legitimacy is a capital stock that spends fast and refills slowly

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