Judge Rejects Bid to Sort Alaska Ballots

A federal judge in Alaska has dismissed the Trump administration’s attempt to force election officials to separate and preserve ballots cast for Daniel J. Sullivan, the candidate whose name matches Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan in the state’s Senate race.

The administration’s theory was simple enough and still failed on contact with the ballot itself. It argued that if the incumbent senator loses, some voters may have meant to vote for him and instead chose the other Sullivan by mistake. U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason said the requested remedy ran into a basic problem: Alaska voters are entitled to a secret ballot, and the government had not explained how it could isolate those votes without violating that protection.

“The absence of any explanation from the United States as to how its requested relief could redress its alleged injury while simultaneously maintaining the secrecy of the ballot is telling,” Gleason wrote, according to NBC News. She was even blunter elsewhere in the ruling, saying the segregation of ballots cast for Daniel J. Sullivan so those voters could be further investigated by law enforcement is not a remedy the court can or should order.

NBC also reported that Gleason rejected the administration’s effort to block certification of the Senate election if Sen. Sullivan loses. That part matters because the lawsuit was not only about preserving ballots; it also sought leverage over the outcome itself.

The politics around the case are messier than the ruling. Republicans have criticized Daniel J. Sullivan’s presence on the ballot for months, accusing Democrats of recruiting a same-name candidate to create confusion. Mary Peltola and her campaign have repeatedly denied that charge. NBC noted that The New York Times recently reported comments from Peltola’s former campaign manager and other sources about efforts to recruit a second Dan Sullivan, though that former manager later sought to retract her comments.

So the judge did not resolve the larger campaign accusation. She decided something narrower and sturdier: a court is not going to carve out a special class of ballots and voters for scrutiny unless the government can show a lawful way to do it without blowing through ballot secrecy. That is less dramatic than the rhetoric around a “rigged” race, and more useful.

There was also a small institutional embarrassment here for the administration. On Saturday, NBC reported, Alaska’s Republican-led state government urged the federal judge to stop the effort.