The lawyer tapped by the Alaska Division of Elections to defend its decision to block a Petersburg man named Dan J. Sullivan from running against Republican U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan hails from a conservative Lower 48 law firm and helped shield the Republican National Committee from being investigated over its ties to the Jan. 6 insurrection.
While such cases are typically handled by state lawyers from the Alaska Department of Law, the state turned to an unusually partisan attorney in Chris Murray, a partner at the First & Fourteenth law firm, whose self-reported accolades include shielding religious organizations from liability over child sexual assault lawsuits. It was Murray who argued the case before Anchorage Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews, frequently echoing Republican talking points floated earlier this week at a House hearing on the disqualification.
Judge Matthews is expected to issue a decision in the appeal by the end of Friday, setting up a potential appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court ahead of next week’s deadline to finalize ballots.
Murray is your prototypical conservative lawyer, with a membership in the Federalist Society and a bio that includes the fact he helped block the U.S. House from investigating the Republican National Committee’s involvement in the January 6 riots. The firm, of which he’s a partner, has a website that includes in its creditentials that it “obtained a complete dismissal of a sexual misconduct lawsuits against Catholic dioceses, leaders, and schools in California, Kansas, Missouri, and Texas” as well as a win in another case shielding the Church of the Latter Day Saints from legal liability for failing to conduct a background check on a Sunday school teacher who had been convicted of sexually abusing a 15-year-old student.
So, to be clear, the Alaska Division of Elections tapped a firm that worked on a case establishing, in its own words, that “there is no fiduciary relationship between a Sunday School teacher and a visiting student with regard to their off-premises, after-hours conduct, and a church has no legal duty to supervise a Sunday School teacher’s after-hours, off-premises conduct.”
Murray is the latest in a long line of attorneys hired under the Dunleavy administration who hail from conservative Lower 48 law firms to take up cases of national Republican interest (see also, former interim Attorney General Stephen Cox, whom the governor hired on as his personal legal counsel moments after lawmakers rejected him for, among many issues, being unfamiliar with the Alaska Constitution’s privacy protections). And at one point, he seemed to be unfamiliar with former Anchorage Mayor Dan A. Sullivan, a Republican who’s Alaska’s original Dan Sullivan.
If Dan A. Sullivan were to, in Murray’s words, “decide against his better interests” to run against Sen. Sullivan, he suggested that it wouldn’t face the same problems because a good-faith candidate would act in a certain way.
“What do genuine political candidates do? They try to distinguish themselves, they try to find any way to draw contrast between themselves and the people that they are challenging,” he said. “That’s not what happened in this case.”
His case is essentially that because the underlying case is an appeal of an administrative decision by Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher — a Trump donor who, upon taking the job, refused to say whether the 2020 election was fairly won by Biden — that the court should trust her expertise in determining that Petersburg Sullivan is running as a bad-faith candidate.
Even though Murray conceded that much of this is innocuous on its own — after all, Dan is a pretty common nickname for people named Daniel, including Sen. Daniel Scott Sullivan — but he argued that all the “seems” and “appears” should be taken together as evidence.
“All of that is incredibly suggestive of an intention not to genuinely seek office, not to distinguish himself from Senator Sullivan, as any other challenger that Senator Sullivan would do, but to confuse himself with Senator Sullivan, and that’s the problem here,” he said. “The division refused to not notice what was happening here. It felt obligated to notice.”
Big picture
At a baseline level, Republicans are nervous they could lose control of the U.S. Senate in the 2026 elections as voters sour on the second Trump presidency, particularly on issues that he and Republicans like Sen. Sullivan insisted were strong points: affordability and staying out of foreign wars. Before the second Sullivan entered the race, Sen. Sullivan was considered to be one of the more vulnerable incumbents this cycle, with a formidable challenger in former Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola.
Murray also took a shot at the state’s election system, which Republicans have long been railing against because it has diminished the party’s control over the candidates appearing on ballots.
“We’re going to be inviting more of this, your honor,” Murray told Anchorage Superior Court Judge during a hearing on Thursday, before echoing the latest GOP talking point that the case was somehow made easier by the state’s open primaries and ranked-choice voting system. “In Alaska, there will be more of this, especially considering the advantages to other candidates within the ranked choice voting system of getting, you know, of getting similar or confusing candidates through the top four primary.”
It largely mirrors what Big Lake Republican Rep. Kevin McCabe argued at Monday’s hearing, where he insisted that the semi-closed partisan primaries of the past would have allowed the Alaska Republican Party to filter out bad actors — which, to be clear, hasn’t been proven.
It should be noted, however, that if both Dan S. Sullivan and Dan J. Sullivan advance from the primary to the general election, the ranked-choice voting system is the perfect way to resolve any confusion. Any voter intent on re-electing Sen. Sullivan rather than his key challenger, Democrat Mary Peltola, could simply rank both Dans above Peltola.
The key issues
After an hour of oral arguments in the Anchorage Superior Court, it’s pretty clear Alaska election officials are on precarious legal footing over their decision to block a Petersburg man named Dan J. Sullivan from running against Republican U.S. Sen. Dan S. Sullivan.
Their evidence that he’s running as a “sham candidate” is largely based on words like “seems” and “appears” rather than hard proof; they can’t point to another case where a U.S. Senate candidate was disqualified for having the same name and they couldn’t really articulate the legal framework that gave them the right to disqualify a candidate due to confusion rather than, say, using a middle name.
But none of that may ultimately decide whether a second Sullivan appears on the 2026 primary election ballot.
That’s because a major question in the case isn’t about whether Petersburg Sullivan is running as a “sham” candidate — as Sen. Sullivan, party Republicans and election officials have suggested and accept as true — or even whether the state overstepped the bounds of the U.S. Constitution’s strict and straightforward requirements for holding a U.S. Senate seat, but a technical issue that stems from the case being an appeal rather than a traditional lawsuit.
As Anchorage Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews said at the outset of arguments, the appeals process positions the state and the court differently than a traditional lawsuit.
“This is an appeal. It’s not a straight civil case,” he said. “Both parties have argued about the standard of review that I should apply, and the parties don’t seem to agree.”
That could have a big impact on how it ultimately lands.
In simple terms, this appeal means that the deliberations of the Division of Elections essentially served as the initial trial. That means the evidence and issues at hand are largely limited to the Division of Elections’ record, with the legal issues focusing primarily on whether the law was applied appropriately, given the record. Importantly, the appeals process also essentially gives state officials the benefit of the doubt that they know what they’re talking about when it comes to running an election and the procedures surrounding it.
The state is using the appeal to argue that Judge Matthews should essentially defer to Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher’s expertise on what makes for a qualified candidate. In her estimation, he was obviously a sham candidate, going by the narrative put forward by Sen. Sullivan and other Republicans. The state has also argued that Petersburg Sullivan is guilty because he wasn’t particularly forthcoming during the initial investigation, but he argues that the state’s communications were spotty, leaving him to learn of new demands through the media.
Jeffrey Robinson, one of the attorneys representing Petersburg Sullivan, argued that the case requires a higher standard of scrutiny under the U.S. Constitution and that the state was wrong to apply this new so-called good-faith standard, which he contends isn’t clearly laid out in any part of state law or regulation.
“This is an election case involving fundamental rights,” he said. “Given that it’s an election case and involves important constitutional considerations, an additional layer of scrutiny is required here because obviously this case implicates the voters’ fundamental rights to choose who they may wish to vote for.”
Robinson’s case is more simple and argues that the entire process was wrong from the get-go. He argues the only grounds for the state to review the eligibility of a candidate for the ballot are the requirements as laid out in the U.S. Constitution — that he’s over 30, a U.S. citizen and intends to live in the state he’s elected to represent. So, he argued, even if there were evidence of a plan to confuse voters — which Robinson and Petersburg Sullivan maintain is unfounded — the state has no legal authority to remove him from the ballot.
While he agreed the state has an interest in ensuring the ballot isn’t confusing, he insisted that there are less severe remedies for the problem than blocking someone from running. He also noted that the courts have previously found that political parties have no special status in the election process that would allow them to direct the Division of Elections’ decisions, leaving issues regarding confusing or misleading candidates to be addressed through a campaign.
“The division can take steps to distinguish the two names on the ballot, and then it’s up to the candidates to campaign and appeal to voters,” Robinson said. “Certainly, Sen. Sullivan is capable of running a campaign that informs his prospective voters which candidate they’re voting for on the ballot, but here the division has no authority to investigate a candidate’s motives in running for office or use that as a basis to exclude.”
While the appeals process may limit Judge Matthews’ ability to review the fundamental legal issues of the case, he seemed skeptical of the state’s arguments that it had the authority to conduct the investigation and to disqualify Petersburg Sullivan for his motives. He frequently asked the state’s attorney for the specific legal basis of the authority, but was often met with vague gestures at legal precedent and ultimately an admission that, no, the state doesn’t have such spelled-out standards anywhere in regulation.
Judge Matthews could rule that Petersburg Sullivan was incorrectly removed from the ballot, but exactly how he should appear on the primary ballot is less clear. At the hearing, there was some discussion of middle names, full names and titles such as “challenger” or “incumbent.”
But Murray signaled the state won’t be making it easy if that’s the direction Judge Matthews goes.
“I’ll say right now, we don’t think a middle initial is sufficient,” he said.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky.
