Trump says he ordered DOJ lawsuit to block Alaska Senate certification if Republican loses

President Donald Trump said Friday that he personally ordered the Justice Department lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska's U.S. Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses. "I'm the one that said do it," Trump told reporters as he landed in Florida for a campaign rally.

The suit, filed late Thursday in federal court in Alaska, demands that the state be barred from certifying a win by Democrat Mary Peltola as long as Daniel J. Sullivan of Petersburg, a fishing community, remains on the ballot. The challenger is unrelated to the incumbent, says he decided to run on his own, and took 4,107 votes in the August primary to the senator's more than 68,000. Republicans call him a Democratic plant meant to siphon votes from the incumbent.

Alaska's Republican election officials wrote the rules that listed him, without a party designation beside his name. A state court and the Alaska Supreme Court both declined to remove him. In its statement Friday, the Justice Department noted that those same officials had concluded the candidacy was an attempt to "mislead" voters — a conclusion the courts refused to act on — and said the United States was suing "to protect the integrity of the 2026 Senate election in Alaska."

The filing arrived 11 days before the Nov. 3 election, months after the ballot was set. This month the Supreme Court let New Hampshire's ban on student IDs stand, on the reasoning that election rules should not be changed close to a vote. Peltola, a former one-term House member who finished first in the nonpartisan primary, called the suit "a blatant, despicable political threat" on her Substack. Devan Barber, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, called it "a sham lawsuit to overturn the will of Alaska voters and steal an election." The senator's campaign kept its distance: "We'll let the DOJ complaint run its course," spokesman Nate Adams wrote, adding that Alaskans can tell the difference between "a Democrat sideshow" and the senator's record. Daniel J. Sullivan did not respond to a request for comment.

Both parties expect a tight margin in a state of 738,000 people, and Alaska's ranked-choice ballot already contains a remedy for name confusion: a voter may rank one Sullivan, then the other. Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden and then tried to block its certification, and voting-rights advocates have long warned the department would end up deployed against elections the president's party might lose. The lawsuit asks a federal court to stop Alaska from certifying a result that does not yet exist.