If Alaska Republican US Sen. Dan Sullivan loses his election—something polling consistently has suggested is more likely than not—President Donald Trump and his Department of Justice don’t plan to accept the results.
In a move that’s shocking even by Trump’s standards, the Department of Justice on Thursday night—acting on Trump’s direct orders—filed an unprecedented lawsuit threatening to block the certification of Alaska’s election results if the Republican senator doesn’t win.
The suit argues that if the margin Sullivan loses by is smaller than the votes that a Petersburg man named Daniel J. Sullivan receives in the race, then it’s proof voters were confused and the winner in that situation, Democrat Mary Peltola, should be blocked from taking office.
“An election result may be impacted by voter confusion if: Senator Sullivan does not win the election,” the filing by the US Department of Justice argues, “and 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.”
It’s the latest and most extreme escalation of Republicans’ hysteria over Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired teacher they accuse of being a plant by Peltola supporters to confuse voters. Both Sen. Sullivan and Trump have often repeated those claims, including allegations of criminal wrongdoing, even though no evidence has ever materialized to back them up.
On Friday, Trump admitted he personally ordered the lawsuit. “I’m the one that said do it,” he told reporters.
It’s an ominous turn ahead of this year’s general election, with growing concerns that Trump may deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the polls and embrace other strong-arm tactics to intimidate voters and state election officials. The US Supreme Court blocked a plan from his administration that would have upended how the Postal Service handles vote-by-mail ballots, but fears are driving a significant share of Democratic voters to vote in person or return ballots by hand.
Trump previously attempted to overturn the presidential election in 2020, an effort driven by baseless accusations of voter fraud that were rejected by the courts. Trump and his allies’ claims of fraud ultimately led to the Jan. 6 attacks on the US Capitol.
The long battle over Daniel J. Sullivan’s campaign
Trump and Attorney General Todd Blanche, whom Sen. Sullivan helped confirm with a key vote, had teased that federal prosecutors were looking into the race. Anonymous DOJ officials have claimed they issued grand jury subpoenas—a step toward bringing criminal charges—but several key figures in the race said they were never contacted, and no such charges have materialized yet.
That’s probably because the Alaska Division of Elections has already picked over the allegations. Alaska Elections Director Carol Beecher—a Trump donor who has refused to say whether he lost the 2020 election—already tried to block Daniel J. Sullivan from the ballot on the voter confusion grounds, and the Alaska Supreme Court has also already weighed in on the issue.
In an order earlier this year, the court ruled that even if the Division of Elections had proved collusion—which it hasn’t—state law has no procedure to remove someone for running for what an appointed elections director thinks is the wrong reason.
But it doesn’t end there.
The Alaska Supreme Court has recognized that having two Dan Sullivans on the ballot could be confusing and gave the Division of Elections the power to settle that confusion through ballot design. That has already brought unprecedented changes to this year’s ballot. Sen. Sullivan is now listed as an incumbent, while Daniel J. Sullivan is listed as “Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr.” and his party affiliation, Republican, isn’t listed at all.
It’s also not at all clear that Daniel J. Sullivan’s campaign would harm Sen. Sullivan.
One post-primary analysis found that most of Daniel J. Sullivan’s 4,098 votes came from left-leaning areas of the state, where his fight against Republicans’ heavy-handed tactics has made him something of a folk hero. Some voters said the Trump attacks are exactly why they voted for him.
“We should be allowed to vote for him if we so choose,” wrote Eagle River resident Connor Eshleman in an Aug. 25 letter to the editor published in the Anchorage Daily News. “So yes, I voted for him in the primary. Not because I thought he could win or would be a good senator, but to send a message that if someone can run and wants to run, they should be able to, regardless of age, race, sex or, yes, even name.”
The DOJ lawsuit also assumes all of Daniel J. Sullivan’s votes would go to Sen. Dan Sullivan, but Alaska’s history of ranked-choice voting shows voters don’t always behave predictably. In Alaska’s 2022 special US House election, about a quarter of voters for one Republican candidate ranked a Democrat second. Other races have shown that a small but significant chunk of voters don’t rank beyond their first choice.
For his part, Daniel J. Sullivan said he decided to run largely to make a statement about his unhappiness with Sen. Sullivan’s support for the Trump agenda, including a controversial compensation fund that Sen. Sullivan stood to personally benefit from before it was nixed.
“I want something to change, and it’s my right to do that,” Daniel J. Sullivan told the Associated Press in July. “I could put up a yard sign; I could write letters. In this case, I thought, wow, this would reach a lot more people.”
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 newsletter on the Alaska Legislature, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky.
