by Josh Kovensky 10.23.26 | 12:23 pm Updated 10.23.26 | 3:45 pm 
The Justice Department asked a federal judge on Friday to stop Alaska from certifying the winner of the state’s Senate election if Mary Peltola (D) unseats Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) in a close race.
It’s the first instance of the DOJ intervening to block the certification of a Senate race to help a losing Republican. In this case, it’s entirely preemptive: the election has not happened yet, though polls project a tight race in Alaska and a series of tight Senate races that could result in a close majority for whichever party wins.
Here, the DOJ argues that the presence of a presumed spoiler candidate on the ballot, Daniel J. Sullivan, will taint the race by confusing voters who intended to vote for the incumbent Republican senator, Daniel S. Sullivan. It demands that the judge block any certification until an investigation can “determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan.”
“Given the substantial likelihood that the inclusion of Daniel J. Sullivan will confuse or mislead voters looking to cast a vote for Senator Sullivan, and thus distort the will of Alaskan voters, there is a substantial likelihood that a certification of the election will reflect an electoral process that lacked integrity,” the lawsuit reads.
Associate Attorney General Stan Woodward, a former attorney for January 6 defendants and one of Trump’s co-defendants in the Mar-a-Lago records case, signed the filing. But later on Friday, Trump himself took credit for the lawsuit.
“I’m the one that said to do it,” he said standing alongside Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R).
The suit marks the first instance of the DOJ doing what many people feared: attempting to intervene in the outcome of an election by trying to block states from certifying a given race. As Republicans have fallen further behind in polling in the House of Representatives, attention has turned from that chamber to the Senate as a potential place where the administration might try to interfere in order to hold on to the GOP majority.
The lawsuit reflects how deeply the White House has politicized the DOJ during the second Trump administration. In 2020, after losing the 2020 election, Trump pushed for the DOJ to intervene in states that he had lost as part of a bid to block the certification of Biden’s win. One DOJ appointee who tried to help in that effort, Jeff Clark, spent years under investigation for his role in the effort; the D.C. bar’s board of professional responsibility recommended that he be disbarred. Allies of the president also organized competing slates of electors in those states, hoping Congress would choose to hand the election to Trump.
Experts don’t see the Alaska case going very far. Derek Muller, a law professor at Notre Dame, described the legal argument “as one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen” in a blog post.
“But the legal claim is so absurdly thin, there’s essentially no likelihood of success,” he wrote, adding later: “In short, like many Department letters over the last few years, it is designed to win the press release rather than the litigation. This one simply takes the form of a complaint.”
Send Tips Josh Kovensky is an investigative reporter for Talking Points Memo, based in New York. He previously worked for the Kyiv Post in Ukraine, covering politics, business, and corruption there.