A federal judge in Alaska has dismissed the Trump administration's lawsuit that pre-emptively challenged the results of a U.S. Senate race featuring two candidates with the same name: Republican incumbent Daniel S. Sullivan and another man, Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired teacher who could act as a spoiler.
The Justice Department filed the suit last month at President Trump's direction. It asked the court to block certification of the state's Senate results if the incumbent lost but would have won had votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan gone to him instead. It also sought an investigation into whether voters who selected the retired teacher actually intended to vote for the senator. Chief Judge Sharon Gleason of the U.S. District Court in Alaska wrote that she did not see how the proposed solution would resolve any confusion, or how it could work while preserving the secrecy of the ballot, which she called a core principle of American democracy.
The ruling is the latest in a series of court defeats for the administration, which has sought to intervene in state-administered elections. On Friday, a federal court in California blocked the administration from threatening to prosecute election officials who do not comply with its ballot-handling directives, and a federal appeals court panel declined to order California officials to set aside about 20,000 mail-in ballots the administration said had been sent to possible noncitizens.
A Justice Department spokeswoman, Kiersten Pels, said the administration plans to appeal and argued that the judge did not address its claim that Daniel J. Sullivan, a/k/a "Decoy Dan," entered the race as a frivolous candidate to confuse voters. Daniel J. Sullivan has said he voted for Democrats in recent presidential races and for Mary Peltola, the current Democratic Senate nominee, in her 2022 and 2024 House campaigns. Peltola and national Democrats have denied any connection to his candidacy.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing