A federal judge on Sunday dismissed the Department of Justice’s lawsuit seeking to delay certification of Alaska’s Senate election if incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) loses, halting its push for discovery into an alleged Democratic-backed spoiler campaign led by allies of Senate candidate Mary Peltola.
U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, found the DOJ lacked standing because it offered no workable remedy for the voter confusion it alleged. The push for discovery intensified just days after the department filed the lawsuit last weekend, following the midweek New York Times report that Democratic operatives helped recruit Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., whose name resembles the senator’s, to siphon support from the incumbent.
The Trump administration’s DOJ incorporated those allegations into an amended complaint Thursday while retaining its request to delay certification if Sullivan loses and reallocating the other Sullivan’s votes could change the outcome. The DOJ is likely to appeal the decision to a higher court, and the Washington Examiner has reached out for comment.
Gleason’s 20-page opinion and the reasoning behind her dismissal of the complaint centered primarily on ballot secrecy. She contended that already-cast ballots had been mixed together and could not be traced to individual voters.
“Those cast ballots have been commingled,” she wrote, explaining that investigators could no longer identify who cast them.
More fundamentally, the “United States provides no workable plan” for separating Election Day ballots and investigating voters’ intentions while preserving ballot secrecy, Gleason wrote. Without a remedy likely to address its alleged injury, the DOJ lacked standing. Legal experts largely echoed this issue with the lawsuit in recent days, given that the DOJ presented no conclusive method for gauging legitimate confusion when auditing individual ballots.
She also invoked the Supreme Court’s warning against changing election rules immediately before voting concludes, saying, “Such late-breaking changes to the election rules are strongly disfavored.”
Despite her skepticism, Attorney General Todd Blanche had argued that Alaska’s ranked choice ballots could reveal mistaken selections without questioning individual voters. Speaking on CNN last Sunday, he said there were scenarios in which confusion could be apparent from how voters listed candidates.
Gleason dismissed the case without prejudice, denied permission to amend again, and rejected the discovery request as moot. She did not decide whether the alleged recruitment operation was lawful.
