Alaska’s Senate race has attracted an unusual genre of legal filing: a preemptive complaint about a loss that hasn’t happened yet. With just over a week until the midterm elections, the Justice Department sued on Thursday to block certification of the state’s hotly contested Senate results, Al Jazeera reported — though the relief has a condition attached. Per the Washington Post, the suit seeks to block certification in the specific scenario where incumbent Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan loses to Democrat Mary Peltola next month. Should he win, one presumes the ballot was fine.
The government’s theory is voter confusion, and it is not completely invented out of thin air. The November ballot contains an independent candidate who also answers to Dan Sullivan — Dan J. Sullivan Jr., per Newsweek — whom the department argues is purposefully running to mislead voters. The Guardian reports that the lawsuit, filed less than two weeks before election day, contends there could be “voter confusion” over the presence of two candidates named Dan Sullivan, which Republicans fear could drain votes from the incumbent. Name-doppelganger spoiler candidacies are a genuinely old and genuinely grubby trick, so there is a respectable gripe in there somewhere.
There is also the small matter of whose lawsuit this is. According to the Guardian, President Trump said he ordered the Justice Department to file it. Politico described the suit as an escalation of the administration’s use of federal power around election certification, and the stakes are large: the contest could decide the balance of power in the Senate, per CNN.
What is genuinely novel here is not the grievance but the choreography. The normal sequence for an election dispute is: votes are cast, someone loses, the loser alleges something was wrong, courts sort it out. This compresses the schedule — allege the something first, condition the complaint on the loss, and let the whole thing sit in a filing cabinet until the scoreboard tells you whether to open it. If Sullivan wins, the confusion was apparently tolerable; if he loses, the election was broken. It is, in a narrow sense, efficient: the dispute skips the suspense and goes straight to court. It also raises, as Al Jazeera put it, concerns that the administration may be looking to meddle in some of this cycle’s other races. Alaska simply got the paperwork first.