President Donald Trump’s Justice Department filed a lawsuit on Thursday seeking to block former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola’s victory in the 2026 US Senate election. If you’re confused by this development, you should be. Because the election won’t happen for more than a week.
The case arises out of an odd candidacy that might undercut incumbent Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan’s reelection bid against Peltola. A man named Dan J. Sullivan also secured a spot on the ballot, and Republicans fear that the not-Senator Sullivan’s presence on the ballot might trick voters who wish to vote for the incumbent into voting for the not-senator instead.
In the abstract, it’s a fair concern. But there are two reasons to doubt that not-Senator Sullivan will attract many voters who actually wanted to vote for the Republican. According to a sample ballot published by Alaska’s Division of Elections, Sen. Sullivan will be identified as a “Registered Republican” and as the “Incumbent,” so voters will be told which Dan Sullivan to vote for if they wish to reelect the one who is actually a senator.
Additionally, Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, a system where voters rank candidates in order of preference, and votes cast for losing candidates are redistributed to voters’ next choice. So an Alaska voter who wants to reelect the Dan Sullivan who is actually a senator, but who is confused as to which Dan Sullivan is the incumbent, can simply rank both Dans Sullivan as their top two choices, and the ranked choice system should ensure that their vote is counted as a vote for Senator Sullivan (and against Peltola).
The question of whether not-Senator Sullivan may appear on the ballot, moreover, has already been litigated. Initially, the Alaska Division of Elections, which is led by a Republican, attempted to disqualify the not-senator because it concluded that he did not seek election to the Senate in “good faith.” Not-Senator Sullivan sued, and an Alaska court ordered him reinstated as a candidate because “the Division’s decision to exclude Mr. Sullivan from the primary ballot was based on a ‘good-faith’ requirement that does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, the Alaska Statutes, or the implementing regulations adopted by the Division” — that is, there is not actually a law that prevents the not-senator from running, even if he is intentionally running as a spoiler candidate.
This lower court order was affirmed by the Alaska Supreme Court last June. If Republicans thought that this decision violates federal law, they could have asked the Division of Elections — which, again, is run by a Republican — to appeal to the US Supreme Court.
Instead, they appear to have let the issue lie until less than two weeks before Election Day, when Trump’s Justice Department filed a new, federal lawsuit claiming that not-Senator Sullivan’s presence on the ballot is somehow illegal, and asking a federal court to preemptively block a Peltola victory in the upcoming election. Trump says that he personally told the Justice Department to file this suit.
It is difficult to find an actual legal argument, much less a persuasive one, anywhere in the Trump DOJ’s complaint initiating the lawsuit. Trump’s lawsuit also runs afoul of something called the “Purcell principle” — a concept that, ironically, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the same day that the Trump administration filed its suit — which says that federal courts should be reluctant to intervene in election-related disputes when the election itself is about to happen.
It is likely, in other words, that the Trump administration’s attempt to overturn a Democratic victory that hasn’t even happened yet will fail. But the mere existence of this new lawsuit, which is known as United States v. Alaska, is an ominous sign that the Trump administration will use every tool in its shed to overturn Democratic victories in the upcoming election.
So what are the actual legal arguments in the Alaska case?
It is a bit of a stretch to even describe the Justice Department’s complaint in this case as a “legal” document, as the complaint does not so much as point to any law that either not-Senator Sullivan or the state of Alaska may have violated, and instead vaguely alludes to legal sources that use terms like “integrity.”
Specifically, the Justice Department points to a federal law which says that it has four purposes, one of which is to “protect the integrity of the electoral process.” It also points to the Supreme Court’s decision in Bullock v. Carter (1972), which said that “a State has an interest, if not a duty, to protect the integrity of its political processes from frivolous or fraudulent candidacies.”
But the statute that Trump’s lawyers quote, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, does not concern which candidates’ names should appear on the ballot. As its name suggests, it is a law about voter registration, and it imposes requirements on states, such as requiring them to register voters when those voters obtain a driver’s license.
Similarly, while Bullock does include a single line indicating that states may enact laws targeting “frivolous or fraudulent candidacies,” nothing in the opinion suggests that sharing another candidate’s name makes someone’s candidacy frivolous or fraudulent. The decision itself concerned unusually high fees charged to a candidate for public office in Texas, and the Court concluded that Texas’s fees were unconstitutional.
The line about “frivolous or fraudulent candidacies,” meanwhile, was included to clarify that states still have some power to regulate ballot access. While Bullock concluded that Texas’s fees were excessive, the opinion also suggests that states may impose more reasonable filing fees on candidates to discourage unserious candidates from seeking office. Alaska, for example, charges a modest filing fee of $100 to US Senate candidates.
The Trump DOJ’s entire argument, in other words, appears to turn on the fact that it identified two legal sources that use the word “integrity” in contexts that bear little resemblance to the Alaska case.
Nevertheless, Trump’s lawyers claim that the court must prevent Alaska from certifying a Peltola victory “pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan.”
This lawsuit also cannot be squared with one of the Republican Party’s favorite legal doctrines
Even if Trump’s Justice Department had a persuasive argument that leaving not-Senator Sullivan on the ballot is illegal, they should still lose Alaska because they waited too long to file the case.
In Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006), the Supreme Court warned that “court orders affecting elections, especially conflicting orders, can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls,” and it added that this “risk will increase” as Election Day draws closer. More recent decisions, many of them joined only by the Court’s Republicans, have read this “Purcell principle” quite expansively to forbid federal courts from issuing election-related decisions in the months leading up to an election. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has even claimed that Purcell prevents federal courts from issuing election-related decisions as soon as nine months before the general election date.
Supreme Court decisions invoking Purcell to shut down lower court orders altering a state’s election rules are now very common in the weeks leading up to an election. On Thursday, for example, the Court relied on the Purcell principle to block a lower court order that would have made it easier for college students to vote in New Hampshire. The Court began its decision with this line: “This Court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”
Trump’s DOJ, meanwhile, did not even file its lawsuit seeking to preemptively invalidate a Peltola victory until less than two weeks before Election Day. If Purcell means anything, it must mean that a federal court cannot force Alaska to kick a candidate off the ballot mere days before a federal election.