Is anyone surprised?
A federal judge on Sunday threw out the Justice Department's lawsuit seeking to stop Alaska from certifying its U.S. Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses. U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason,
an Obama nominee, ruled in a 20-page order that the government lacks standing, writing that it "failed to establish the redressability prerequisite for Article III standing," CBS News reported.
🚨 BREAKING: A Obama judge just TOSSED the DOJ's Alaska lawsuit over the FAKE Dan Sullivan, per AP
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) November 1, 2026
UNBELIEVABLE. They’re even working on a SUNDAY to rig the election out here.
Judge Gleason dismissed the suit, which tried to BLOCK certification of a Sen. Dan Sullivan loss if… pic.twitter.com/xdjzzbVrBY
The department sued on Oct. 22, after Trump said he had ordered the case. It asked the court to bar Alaska from certifying any result "that may be impacted by voter confusion" and to make the state "preserve and segregate" ballots marked for Daniel J. Sullivan, a Petersburg retiree who shares the senator's name, Alaska Public Media reported. The idea was to investigate whether those voters meant to pick the incumbent.
Gleason was sharpest on the segregation request, which the department pressed in a Friday filing. She wrote that "the United States provides no workable plan as to how it proposes to segregate ballots" cast for the second Sullivan. The state's lawyers had argued that ballots carry no voter names and are mixed in the box, so no such inquiry is possible, and that it would violate ballot secrecy.
She added that the order would likely cause voter "confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls." "Such late-breaking changes to the election rules are strongly disfavored," Gleason wrote, and the requests "certainly involve the time, place, and manner of Alaska's election," which the Constitution leaves to the states, per the AP.
The department had amended its complaint on Oct. 29, adding a Supremacy Clause claim built on the National Voter Registration Act. Democracy Docket reported that Gleason also denied leave to amend again, finding another rewrite futile. A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to CBS, and Alaska Public Media said an appeal is likely.
The dismissal does not end the federal criminal investigation into how Daniel J. Sullivan got on the ballot. The department has issued grand jury subpoenas, and no one has been charged, according to the AP. The probe follows a New York Times report, covered here, that Democratic operatives recruited Alaskans named Dan Sullivan; Mary Peltola's campaign denies any role. Gov. Mike Dunleavy has ordered a state investigation, and the feds have surged agents into Alaska, as we noted Friday.
Sullivan, appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," said "I'm sure I'm going to lose a lot of votes to that trickery." Peltola said she is "not interested in tricking voters," per CBS.
The suit was the Trump administration's pre-emptive bid to shape a count that was still two days away. Trump had vowed "powerful legal options" against the other Sullivan, who got 2.5% in the primary, and Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the case on CBS. Alaska's answer to the confusion argument was that voters in the ranked-choice race can rank both Sullivans, and election officials added identifiers to the ballot to tell them apart.
Voting ends Tuesday...
As Jonathan Turley wrote earlier, amid the constant chatter about 'saving democracy', Democratic party leaders appear to embrace these voter confusion tactics as harmless ("it's part of the process") or even humorous ("I think it's funny.")
In his work "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell explains that "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." If so, the news this week took a truly Orwellian turn as Democrats rationalized or even praised the effort in Alaska to put a decoy "Dan Sullivan" on the ballot to confuse Alaskans and cause mistaken votes. Other Democratic politicians are entirely silent on the allegation that the campaign of Democratic candidate Mary Peltola engineered this grossly unethical tactic. The very same people running on "saving Democracy" are, once again, defending ballot manipulation designed to negate the votes of citizens.
It is the ultimate expression of rage politics, excusing any act needed to achieve power.
On NewsNation Now, Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA) went beyond many of his colleagues in saying that the Alaskan scandal shows precisely where all states, including Virginia, should go. When asked about the scandal, Subramanyam insisted that it showed how all states should embrace the widely criticized ranked-choice voting system. (Alaskans may finally reject the system this year). While asked about the use of a decoy candidate, Subramanyam bizarrely spun the question as third-party candidates - a bizarre claim since the fake Dan Sullivan has not campaigned, has never run for office, and is obviously on the ballot solely to confuse voters.
Nevertheless, Subramanyam insisted, while he would not run a decoy, "I also don't have a ranked-choice voting system in Virginia. I wish I did, honestly. But, in Alaska, they have ranked-choice voting, and third-party candidates are very relevant. And so, if you recruited a third-party candidate who can take votes away from your opponent, that's part of the process, and that's just how it works in Alaska." Previously, Subramanyam also supported the most radical gerrymandering effort in the nation (which was later struck down as unlawful).
Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) seemed to snowball as he tried to rationalize the move. He first attempted to blame it on one woman who was a "disgruntled former employee." When CNN host Kaitlan Collins noted that The New York Times was relying on a large number of sources in the Peltola campaign, Murphy said it wouldn't bother him at all to have decoys on his ballot because no one would be confused when voting. Of course, the entire reason you put another Dan Sullivan on the ballot is to confuse voters and cause citizens to throw away their votes on the wrong man. In a close election, that can easily make the difference in the outcome of the election. Murphy also praised the Peltola campaign and said he "trusts" them, despite the New York Times saying they actively sought to cause such voting errors.
Chris Murphy WON'T condemn Mary Peltola's campaign for trying to confuse voters with a fake Dan Sullivan:
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 29, 2026
CNN: Why would her campaign go recruit another Dan Sullivan to take votes away from him?
MURPHY: "Well, uh, again, I haven't done my own research..." pic.twitter.com/7H82IRwjNn
In 2025, Murphy appeared on any cable show that would have him to declare that "those of us who believe that the threat to democracy is urgent" need to "act like it."
Most Democratic leaders refused to say anything at all in the face of an open effort to nullify votes through candidate confusion.
Pundits and party officials have dismissed the scandal as brass-knuckles politics or even as humorous. The head of Alaska's Democratic Party, Eric Croft, insisted that the sole consideration is whether it is a crime, not whether it is unethical: "I reread all of Alaska's statutes. I'm kind of a recovering attorney up here. And there is nothing, there's no legal issue to it. On your, you know, sort of dirty tricks thing, I think Alaskans have a different take there too."
When pressed whether it is a good thing to try to confuse Alaskan voters and nullify their votes, Croft responded "No, I think it's funny."
That knee-slapper involves a politician and campaign that allegedly lied to the public about their involvement. It involves a decoy who is also accused of lying when he said he had no interaction with third parties and did not enter the race to confuse voters. (Notably, the decoy, when asked by the Division of Elections how his name should appear on the ballot, reportedly asked to use "S" as a middle initial (like the senator) as opposed to his own initial of "J." ).
One would think that this would be an easy question for candidates who insist that they are defenders of democracy. However, in 2024, Democrats moved to remove Trump and other Republicans from ballots while claiming to be protecting voters by denying them the choice of candidates. The fact that the voters gave Trump the popular vote and swept every swing state only magnified the hypocrisy of these Democratic leaders. Yet, some of the same figures are back at it again with efforts to manipulate balloting to confuse or nullify votes in the name of protecting democracy.
Some of the same figures, such as Marc Elias, have reappeared in yet another election scandal. The Elias Law Group was named by the New York Times as involved in the controversy. Elias was a central figure in the Russian hoax as the campaign lawyer for Hillary Clinton. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) fined the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign for violating election rules in hiding the funding for the infamous Steele dossier. Before the election, Clinton officials denied any such involvement.
In an age of rage, consistency, like decency, is a stranger to politics.
🚨 NOW: VP JD Vance GOES OFF on the Democrats' Alaska cheating scam to confuse voters into voting for a fake Dan Sullivan over GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) October 27, 2026
"If WE were running somebody whose name was Mary Peltola (D) in the state of Alaska, the media would be accusing us of ELECTION… pic.twitter.com/p9u6MlJhHZ
We are left again in that moment with lawyer Joseph Welch in the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954: "Have you no shame, sir, at long last? Have you no shame?" The answer today is clear: No, but I have the votes.
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