Trump's DOJ Wants to Freeze Alaska's Vote Count Early

Alaska's Republican-run state government told a federal judge on Saturday there is "no reason for this Court to entertain this meritless lawsuit any longer" — a lawsuit the Justice Department filed at President Donald Trump's direction to stop certification of a possible Democratic win in the state's U.S. Senate race. The target is a count that hasn't happened yet. The votes aren't even tallied, and the apparatus of federal law enforcement is already moving to decide which results are allowed to stand.

The complaint demands that U.S. District Judge Sharon L. Gleason halt certification, but only in the event Democrat Mary Peltola wins. That's the whole trick, laid bare: a block that switches on for one outcome and not the other. Election law experts have roundly criticized it. The stated reason is to determine whether voters were confused by a second candidate on the ballot who shares a name with Peltola's main rival, Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan.

Who Has the Power

The Justice Department's legal hook is a preamble to a 1990s voter registration law, which the Trump administration says gives it responsibility for ensuring states maintain the "integrity" of federal elections. It says it's simply trying to combat fraud. It also issued a wave of subpoenas and announced a criminal investigation, as the administration has stepped up its use of its legal powers to support Trump's side in Tuesday's midterm elections.

On Friday, the department piled on another request: that the judge separate all ballots showing votes for the second Dan Sullivan, to figure out whether voters were fooled into wasting their votes on a spoiler. Alaska's filing called that "both disturbing and impossible," noting there'd be no way to do it without violating voter privacy. Trump also demanded that Peltola be prosecuted after The New York Times reported that internal texts and posts appear to show her campaign was involved in recruiting the second Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher in the remote fishing village of Petersburg. Peltola has denied involvement.

Who Gets Crushed

The voters. Those who marked a ballot for the second Sullivan, whatever their reasons, now face the prospect of having their choices sorted into a separate pile and examined by a government hunting for evidence of who they "really" supported. The American Civil Liberties Union put it plainly in its filing urging dismissal: "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 state's own filing says officials "carefully designed the ballot to minimize voter confusion." The senator is listed as a Republican and the incumbent. The other is simply "Daniel J. Sullivan Jr." with no party affiliation. The Alaska Supreme Court ruled this summer that the second candidate fulfilled all legal requirements to stay on.

What They're Calling "Order"

Here's the strange part. The people stepping in front of the federal machine aren't movement organizers. They're the state's Republican attorney general's office, headed by acting Atty. Gen. Cori Mills, along with Peltola's campaign and voting rights groups, who are in what the base reporting calls "unusual alignment" with Alaska state officials. Gov. Mike Dunleavy, also a Republican, announced a state investigation after the Times article and condemned the second Sullivan's placement on the ballot. Yet the state's filing holds that the revelations "don't change the fact that both Sullivans are legally on the ballot." Its line: "Not every wrong can be righted in federal court."

Notice what's happening. Two arms of the same ruling class are fighting over who gets to run the counting, and the dispute is being settled in a courtroom, by one judge, under rules written by the powerful. The state asked Gleason to dismiss the case with prejudice and let officials conduct the election "free from unwarranted federal interference." Gleason had set a Saturday deadline for arguments on whether to dismiss without even a hearing.

The midterms are Tuesday. Whatever the judge decides, the real stakes are already visible: a race that could determine which party controls the U.S. Senate, and a federal government willing to use subpoenas, criminal investigations and a lawsuit built on a statute's preamble to shape the result before the ballots are counted.