In a major pre-election defeat for the White House, a federal judge on Sunday dismissed a Department of Justice lawsuit attempting to block Alaska from certifying its U.S. Senate election results.
U.S. District Court Chief Judge Sharon Gleason threw out the federal government’s civil complaint, ruling just two days before Election Day that the Department of Justice (DOJ) lacks legal standing to interfere with the state’s independent tabulation of ballots.
The Battle Over the Ballot
The high-stakes legal battle, filed as United States v. Alaska, was launched at the direct urging of President Trump. The DOJ sought an emergency injunction to halt state election certification if incumbent Republican Senator Dan S. Sullivan loses his re-election bid to Democratic nominee Mary Peltola.
The administration’s central argument focused on the state’s ranked-choice ballot, which features both the incumbent and a non-incumbent challenger named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. The DOJ contended that the nearly identical names would cause fatal voter confusion, thereby violating federal constitutional protections.
To remedy this, federal attorneys demanded that the state segregate, pause, or investigate anonymous ballots cast in the race.
“Infeasible” and a Threat to Secret Ballots
In a decisive written opinion issued Sunday afternoon, Judge Gleason rejected the federal government’s arguments on both procedural and constitutional grounds.
• No Standing: The court established that the federal government does not have the authority to sue a sovereign state over its internal election administration procedures under these circumstances.
• Constitutional Violations: Judge Gleason stated that the DOJ’s sweeping demands to isolate and audit individual votes were entirely “infeasible.”
• The Secret Ballot: Most critically, the court ruled that the federal government’s proposed intervention directly threatened voters’ constitutional right to a secret ballot, as attempting to track down and isolate specific anonymous ballots would compromise voter privacy.
Part of a Broader Pre-Election Legal Wave
The dismissal in Alaska marks the latest setback for the Trump administration’s aggressive, eleventh-hour legal campaign targeting state election systems across the country.
The ruling capped off a weekend of intense judicial pushback against the DOJ. In a separate order on Sunday, a federal judge in California commanded the DOJ to immediately cease threatening local election officials with criminal sub-poenas over mail-in ballots. Meanwhile, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a parallel DOJ effort to isolate thousands of ballots in California over unverified voter-eligibility claims.
Alaska state election officials confirmed following the ruling that ballot tabulation and ranked-choice processing will proceed exactly as scheduled on Tuesday night. The DOJ has not yet announced whether it intends to file an emergency appeal to the Ninth Circuit.
