Alaska's Republican-run state government told a federal judge Saturday that separating ballots cast for a spoiler candidate who shares a name with the incumbent Republican senator is "both disturbing and impossible" — and that single word, "impossible," tells ordinary Americans everything about who the system protects when oversight gets inconvenient.
At stake is a U.S. Senate seat that could determine chamber control. Democrat Mary Peltola stands to win, and the Department of Justice, at President Trump's direction, wants certification halted until the state can determine whether voters were fooled into casting wasted votes for a second "Dan Sullivan" — a retired schoolteacher in Petersburg listed on the ballot simply as "Daniel J. Sullivan Jr." The New York Times reported this week that internal texts and posts suggest Peltola's campaign was involved in recruiting that second Sullivan onto the ballot. Peltola has denied involvement. Alaska's Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, condemned the spoiler's placement and announced a state probe after the Times story broke.
But Alaska's attorney general's office isn't backing the president's legal remedy. The Saturday filing called the DOJ lawsuit "meritless" and said there is "no reason for this Court to entertain" it further. Separating the ballots? Can't be done without violating voter privacy, the state claims. The two Sullivans are already distinguished on the ballot — the senator listed as Republican and incumbent — so "state officials carefully designed the ballot to minimize voter confusion," the filing states. The Alaska Supreme Court already ruled this summer that the second Sullivan met all legal requirements to stay on.
The Chicago Tribune and WTOP both framed the state's filing as a straightforward rebuke, emphasizing that Alaska's own Republican government is pushing back against Trump. What neither outlet lingered on is the pattern. In California, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday similarly rejected the Justice Department's emergency bid to set aside roughly 20,000 ballots tied to suspected noncitizen registrations. A UCLA analysis found more than four in ten flagged names couldn't even be found on the state's voter rolls, and thousands of U.S. citizens appear to have been wrongly flagged. The New York Post covered Trump's praise for LA federal prosecutor Bill Essayli and his vow to keep fighting, but the courts remain unmoved — with Judge David O. Carter warning that separating ballots could "disrupt the election and disenfranchise eligible voters."
So the message from both Republican state officials and federal judges is consistent: once ballots are in the system, reviewing them is either impossible, unconstitutional, or too disruptive. The DOJ argues a preamble to 1990s voter registration law gives it responsibility to ensure election integrity. Every authority with the power to agree has refused.
Alaska officials want the lawsuit dismissed "with prejudice" and state election workers left alone — "free from unwarranted federal interference." The question that won't go away: if a spoiler candidate recruited by one campaign can share a ballot name with an incumbent, and nobody can review the ballots afterward, what exactly is the mechanism for accountability?
