Feds Try to Freeze an Election Before Votes Are Counted

Alaska's attorney general told a federal judge on Saturday that there is "no reason for this Court to entertain this meritless lawsuit any longer" — a lawsuit filed at President Donald Trump's direction to block certification of a possible Democratic win in the state's U.S. Senate race. The target: the vote-counting machinery of a state, three days before Election Day, aimed at protecting one incumbent from the possibility of losing.

Who Has the Power

The Department of Justice filed its complaint Oct. 22 against local election officials, arguing the Senate race results shouldn't be certified unless Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan is declared the winner. Read that again. Certification, in this telling, depends on who wins.

The administration's legal hook is a preamble to a 1990s voter registration law, which it says gives Washington responsibility for ensuring states maintain the "integrity" of federal elections. The American Civil Liberties Union, in a filing urging dismissal, put it bluntly: "Imagine if the federal executive could pluck a few words like 'election integrity' from some statutory preamble and, on that basis alone, bend the machinery of state elections to his will, preemptively blocking certification of a U.S. Senate election to protect his preferred candidate from defeat and then subjecting voters to a law-enforcement-led inquest about who they 'really' supported."

The DOJ didn't stop at the lawsuit. It issued a wave of subpoenas and announced a criminal investigation. Trump also demanded that Democrat Mary Peltola be prosecuted.

Who Gets Crushed

The voters, naturally. On Friday the DOJ added a request that the judge separate all ballots showing votes for a second candidate named Dan J. Sullivan, until it can be determined whether voters were fooled into wasting their votes on a spoiler. Alaska's filing called that idea "both disturbing and impossible," because there's no way to do it without violating voter privacy. "No matter how the ballots are physically stored, it will be easy to tell which ballots rank Daniel J.," the state wrote. It added that the demand ignores "Alaskan voters' vital right to ballot secrecy."

So the proposal would mean tagging ballots by who people voted for, then sorting them for a law-enforcement-flavored review. The DOJ's own framing, as the state's lawyers read it, treats the voters themselves as the thing to be investigated.

What They're Calling "Integrity"

The administration says it's simply trying to combat fraud. Its amended complaint leans on a New York Times report alleging Peltola's campaign helped recruit the second Sullivan, a retired school teacher in the remote fishing village of Petersburg. The Times story cited a former campaign manager who later tried to retract her statements, plus texts and contributions from a political group backing Peltola to an out-of-state Democratic consultant. Peltola denies it. "I want fewer candidates in the primary. I'm not out soliciting more competition," she told a Friday night rally, adding she did "not need any help" defeating Sullivan.

Sullivan, meanwhile, told Fox News on Saturday: "It's deception. But at its worst, it's disdain for us Alaskans."

Here's what the dispute exposes about the whole machine. Both parties' operatives are accused of gaming the ballot, and the answer from the top is to have the federal executive step in and decide the outcome. Alaska's Supreme Court approved the second Sullivan's name months ago. State officials, the filing says, "carefully designed the ballot to minimize voter confusion" — the senator listed as a Republican and the incumbent, the other simply as "Daniel J. Sullivan Jr."

The Referee Question

Alaska's Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, announced a state probe after the Times story and condemned the second Sullivan's placement on the ballot. Yet his state's attorney general is the one asking U.S. District Court Judge Sharon L. Gleason to "immediately dismiss this lawsuit with prejudice and allow state officials to conduct the general election — including ballot counting and certification — free from unwarranted federal interference."

The state's lawyers wrote: "Not every wrong can be righted in federal court." Gleason set a Saturday deadline for dismissal arguments and is expected to rule soon on whether the case continues. Peltola's campaign and voting rights groups have also urged her to toss it.

So the fate of a Senate seat, and possibly control of the chamber, now rests on one judge's ruling about whether the executive branch can freeze a count it doesn't like. Whatever she decides, the lesson is already on the record: the people who run the apparatus treat the ballot as theirs to adjust, and everyone else as raw material for the inquest.