Justice Department Asks Alaska Judge to Set Aside Ballots for Second Dan Sullivan as Criminal Probe Into ‘Sham Candidate’ Claims Widens

The United States Justice Department has asked a federal judge in Alaska to order election officials to preserve and set aside every ballot that ranks a little-known Senate candidate who shares the Republican incumbent’s name, as a criminal investigation into claims of a “sham candidate” scheme gathered speed on Friday, four days before the midterm elections.

The request, filed before U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason in Anchorage, asks the court to rule by Monday, the day before voters go to the polls. It is the latest escalation in a case that has turned one of the closest Senate races in the country into a legal fight over two men called Dan Sullivan — and over how far the federal government may go in policing a state election while ballots are still being cast.

At a press conference in Anchorage on Friday, the Justice Department’s top prosecutor in Alaska, U.S. Attorney Michael Heyman, confirmed that a criminal investigation into the affair has been running for several months and has now been accelerated. He said a recent report in the New York Times about the supposed recruitment of the second Sullivan had driven a “surge” of FBI resources into the case, and that he had assigned several prosecutors to it, with investigative steps taking place “intensely and swiftly.”

Heyman described the Times report as alleging a “sprawling conspiracy to recruit and prop up Daniel J. Sullivan as a sham candidate.” He declined to say what crime may have been committed, named no targets, and confirmed that no charges have been filed. But the public confirmation of an open criminal investigation by a sitting U.S. attorney, days before an election, is itself highly unusual — and it landed in a race that could help decide control of the Senate.

According to Reuters, the department’s civil lawsuit, filed last week, asks the court to block Alaska from certifying the Senate result if the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan, loses a close race on a ballot that also carries the nonpartisan candidate Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. The department argues that voters could be confused by the two near-identical names, and that the second Sullivan’s candidacy was orchestrated to siphon votes from the senator.

The two Sullivans on the ballot

The contest pits Senator Sullivan, a Republican first elected in 2014 and seeking a third term, against Democrat Mary Peltola, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives. A third name on the ballot, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., is a retired schoolteacher from Petersburg, a small fishing community in south-east Alaska, with no previous political experience.

On the general election ballot, the senator is listed as “Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican) Incumbent.” The challenger appears as “Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr.” with no party affiliation. Under Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, voters rank candidates in order of preference, and the count proceeds through rounds of elimination until one candidate holds a majority — a system designed, in part, to let voters express a second choice if their first is eliminated.

In the August primary, Peltola took 49.5 percent of the vote, Senator Sullivan 41.4 percent, Daniel J. Sullivan 2.5 percent and Republican Gerald Heikes 1.1 percent, according to figures cited in court filings. The numbers explain why the second Sullivan matters: in a race this tight, even a small share of the vote cast for a namesake could matter if the count comes down to a few thousand ballots — and the Justice Department’s lawsuit is built precisely on that arithmetic.

The department’s complaint asks the court to bar certification if two conditions are met: first, that Senator Sullivan does not win the election; and second, that had every vote cast for Daniel J. Sullivan been cast instead for Senator Sullivan, and the ranked-choice process played out on that basis, the senator would have won. In that event, certification would wait for “an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan.”

The lawsuit, United States v. State of Alaska, was filed on October 22 in federal court in Anchorage. On Thursday, October 29, the department filed an amended complaint adding a new legal claim under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, arguing that certifying a result shaped by the alleged scheme would stand in the way of federal election law. The amended complaint also added fresh accusations against Peltola’s campaign.

President Donald Trump has said he instigated the civil lawsuit, and last week he called for Peltola to be criminally prosecuted and removed from the ballot. On Wednesday, hours after the Times published its report, Trump repeated that call. The Justice Department said in court filings on Wednesday afternoon that it plans to seek information from the Peltola campaign as part of the lawsuit.

The report that set off the investigations

The chain of events began on Wednesday, October 28, when the New York Times reported that aides to Peltola’s campaign had been part of an effort to recruit an independent challenger with the same name as the Republican incumbent, in what the campaign internally called the “ballot composition project.” The report said the effort involved the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and operatives who spent months recruiting candidates to take votes from Senator Sullivan.

Peltola’s campaign has denied any involvement. In a statement issued after the Times report, the campaign said it has had “no involvement with either Sullivan campaign.” Peltola herself has denied knowing about any effort to recruit the second Sullivan, and Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. has denied coordinating with her campaign.

The denials have not slowed the official response. On Wednesday evening, Alaska’s Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, said the Times report showed “evidence of an organized effort to manipulate Alaska’s elections” and ordered the state Department of Public Safety to investigate. Dunleavy promised a “thorough and by the book” investigation, but acknowledged that the inquiry may not be wrapped up before Election Day.

Separately, the Justice Department had already been active. According to the Wall Street Journal, the department issued grand jury subpoenas in August as part of an investigation into whether Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. entered the race to confuse voters and take votes from the senator. Heyman said on Friday that the Times report brought “additional information that accelerated what we’ve been doing.”

The department’s Friday motion also sought fast-tracked discovery from Peltola’s campaign, her campaign committee Alaskans for Mary, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — sworn written answers, documents and depositions — covering, among other things, a consultant named Jim Lottsfeldt, any money paid to Daniel J. Sullivan, and the circumstances in which a campaign worker’s job ended.

A finding in June — and a court reversal

The dispute over the second Sullivan is not new. In June, Alaska’s own Division of Elections took a position that now sits at the centre of the federal case. On June 15, the division’s director, Carol Beecher, wrote to Daniel J. Sullivan telling him that his declaration of candidacy had been filed “with a purpose to confuse or mislead and to thereby compromise the ballot’s fairness or neutrality,” and decertified his candidacy. The letter cited his request to appear on the ballot as “Dan Sullivan,” a switch to the Republican Party shortly before filing, a campaign consultant who backs Democrats, and a website resembling the senator’s. The filing also noted that Daniel J. Sullivan had told the Times he voted for Democrats in the last three presidential elections.

But the state’s own courts disagreed. On June 26, the Alaska Superior Court found that the decertification was not based on applicable law and that the finding of voter confusion was not supported by a preponderance of the evidence. The Alaska Supreme Court summarily affirmed that ruling on June 29. Both Sullivans stayed on the ballot.

The Alaska Republican Party had previously tried to get Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. off the ballot, arguing that he was a Democratic plant. The state, represented by the Alaska Department of Law, has now asked the federal court to dismiss the Justice Department’s lawsuit “immediately, with prejudice,” arguing that any confused voter can get help, or can rank both Sullivans as first and second choices under the ranked-choice system so that the vote counts for either Sullivan over any other candidate.

That tension — between the state’s election officials, who certified the ballot and defended it in court, and the federal government, which is now suing those same officials — is one of the most striking features of the case. The federal complaint rests largely on the finding of the very official it is suing: the Division of Elections’ June letter is attached to the Justice Department’s filing as supporting evidence.

A race that could decide the Senate

The legal fight is unfolding against the backdrop of a midterm election that will set the tone for the final two years of Trump’s presidency. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are on the ballot, along with 35 of the 100 Senate seats. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate and a 218-214 majority in the House. Political forecasters give Democrats a clear edge in the race for the House and a narrower path in the Senate — and the closely contested race in Alaska is seen as crucial to Democratic hopes of taking control of the upper chamber.

Early voting has already set a record. More than 49 million Americans had cast ballots by the final weekend, either in person or by mail, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab — up from nearly 46 million who voted before Election Day in the last midterms, in 2022. The scale of early voting means that millions of ballots are already in the system while the Justice Department’s requests are still before the court.

Trump has spent the final month of the campaign on a blitz through states including South Carolina, Ohio, Mississippi, Michigan and Georgia, and had been expected to close the campaign in Florida on October 30 before restoring rallies in Kansas and Iowa for Sunday, November 1, after Republican officials in both states asked him to come. The two states are among a short list of Senate races — including Alaska, North Carolina and Maine — that will decide the Senate majority.

The Alaska fight is also part of a wider pattern of federal intervention in the administration of the election. According to Reuters, the Trump administration has sued California to try to prevent the counting of ballots cast by more than 20,000 registered voters it alleged could be noncitizens, and has sued roughly 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking unredacted voter rolls. On Friday, a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to stop threatening to prosecute California election officials who do not comply with its directives on alleged voting by noncitizens.

Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Reuters that the administration’s actions parallel the tactics used by election deniers after the 2020 presidential election. While the administration is unlikely to win in court, he said, the efforts could create a political atmosphere that leads to official misconduct. “It’s about creating uncertainty, sowing fear, distrust, chaos, hoping that you create the political circumstances in which maybe the lieutenant governor of Alaska does feel pressure to do something that they’re not supposed to do,” he said.

Even so, public confidence in the process remains high. A bipartisan majority of American voters trust the electoral process, with 76 percent saying they are confident their ballots will be counted accurately, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted between September 30 and October 5. Some 15 percent were not confident and the rest were not sure or did not answer. Confidence was about equally high among Republicans and Democrats.

Analysis: Why It Matters

1. Ranked-choice voting is on trial as much as the candidates are

Alaska adopted ranked-choice voting in 2020, and it has shaped the state’s politics ever since. Peltola herself won her House seat under the system in 2022, and Senator Lisa Murkowski was re-elected the same year in a race where ranked-choice voting rewarded the candidate with the broadest second-preference support. The system was designed to reduce the power of narrow, negative campaigning and to let voters support a second choice without wasting a ballot.

The Justice Department’s case cuts directly against that design. Its central claim is that a second candidate with the same name can distort the count — but Alaska’s own election officials have argued the opposite, that the ranked-choice system is precisely what protects a confused voter, because ranking both Sullivans first and second means the vote counts for one of them over any other candidate. The federal court will now have to weigh a theory of confusion against a voting system built to absorb exactly that kind of error. Whichever way Judge Gleason rules, the case will become a reference point in the national argument over ranked-choice voting, which is now used in Alaska and Maine and has been adopted or proposed in a string of other states and cities.

2. A prosecutor confirming an open investigation days before polling day breaks with long-standing norms

The Justice Department has, for decades, operated under internal guidance that discourages overt investigative steps close to an election that could affect its outcome — a principle rooted in the idea that the department’s power should not be seen to favour one candidate. That norm has been tested before, most famously in 2016, and it is being tested again now: a U.S. attorney holding a press conference four days before the election to confirm a criminal investigation, to describe its target as a “sham candidate,” and to announce a surge of FBI resources, is an overt investigative step by any definition.

The department’s defenders will say the timing was forced on it — that the New York Times report created new facts, that the criminal inquiry predates the report by months, and that a court, not a prosecutor, will decide what happens to the ballots. That is true, and it matters: the requests are being made to a federal judge, in public filings, with the state free to oppose them. But the political context cannot be wished away. The president has said he instigated the civil case and has publicly called for his opponent to be prosecuted. When the head of state is a party to the litigation in all but name, every procedural step carries a political charge, whatever its legal merits. The courts’ handling of the case — and the speed of it, with a ruling sought by Monday — will be read as closely as the outcome.

3. Certification is becoming the new battleground

The most consequential request in the case is not the ballot-segregation motion but the attempt to block certification. Certification is the unglamorous, administrative act by which a state confirms its results and sends them on their way — and in recent years it has become the pressure point where losing campaigns and their allies try to delay or derail an outcome they cannot win at the ballot box. The Justice Department is asking the court to make certification conditional on a hypothetical: that the incumbent would have won if every vote for his namesake had gone to him instead.

That is a remarkable ask. It treats voters’ expressed preferences as a puzzle to be solved after the fact, rather than as the result to be certified. It also invites a counterfactual that can never be cleanly proved: nobody can know with certainty how a voter who ranked Daniel J. Sullivan first would have ranked the ballot without him on it. The state’s lawyers have made exactly that point, and the federal judge will have to decide whether an investigation into voters’ intentions is a proper basis for holding up the democratic process, or whether it is an attempt to relitigate the election in court after the votes are counted. The answer will be watched far beyond Alaska, because the certification tactic, once legitimised in one race, will be available in every close race that follows.

4. What the evidence shows — and what it does not

It is worth being precise about what is established and what is not. What is established: two candidates with near-identical names are on the Alaska ballot; the state election authority initially found that the second candidacy was filed to confuse voters; the state’s courts overturned that finding for lack of evidence; the Justice Department issued grand jury subpoenas in August; and a newspaper investigation reported that people connected to the Democratic campaign worked to recruit the second candidate. What is not established: that any voter was actually confused; that the recruitment, if it happened, broke any law; or that the outcome of the race would be different without the second Sullivan on the ballot.

That gap matters, because the legal claims rest on the second set of propositions, not the first. Recruiting a candidate to run is, in ordinary circumstances, politics: parties recruit candidates all the time, and third candidates are often fielded precisely to draw votes from a rival. The line between sharp practice and unlawful conduct depends on the specific law alleged to have been broken — and so far the department has not said which law that is. Until it does, the case rests on the moral force of the word “sham,” not on a stated criminal theory. The judge’s ruling on Monday, and any charges that may or may not follow, will show whether the department can close that gap.

5. The Senate math makes Alaska disproportionate to its size

Alaska has fewer than 750,000 residents, and its Senate race rarely commands national attention. This year it does, because the arithmetic of the Senate is so tight. Republicans hold 53 seats; Democrats need a net gain of four to take control, and the map gives them few realistic chances. Alaska is one of them, alongside North Carolina and Maine, and it is the only one where the incumbent’s re-election is genuinely in doubt. That is why a dispute over a retired schoolteacher from Petersburg is being litigated by the Justice Department, debated on cable news, and followed by the White House.

The disproportion is the point. In a Senate where small states carry the same weight as large ones, a single close race in a small state can decide the balance of power in Washington. The intensity of the fight over the Alaska ballot is a measure of how much is at stake — and a reminder that the rules of American elections are often settled not in the campaign, but in the courtroom after it.

What to Watch Next

1. Judge Gleason’s ruling by Monday: The Justice Department has asked for a decision on the ballot-preservation order before Election Day. Whether the judge grants it, narrows it, or rejects it will set the terms for everything that follows — and a same-day ruling would come with only hours to spare.
2. Whether any charges are filed: Heyman confirmed an investigation but named no targets and no offence. The credibility of the “sham candidate” allegation will turn on whether prosecutors can identify a specific crime and bring a case — or whether the investigation ends, as many election inquiries do, without charges.
3. The certification question: The civil case asks the court to block certification if Senator Sullivan loses under the stated conditions. Any ruling on that request will be appealed immediately, and the litigation could run well past Election Day, leaving Alaska’s Senate seat in legal limbo.
4. How voters actually ranked the Sullivans: Alaska’s ranked-choice count will show how many voters ranked Daniel J. Sullivan first, and where their ballots flowed next. Those numbers will be the first hard evidence of whether confusion — or deliberate support — was at work.
5. The result on Tuesday night: If either candidate wins by a comfortable margin, the legal fight loses much of its force. If the race is close — and the primary suggests it will be — the courtroom will become the second arena of the election, and Alaska could be counting, and litigating, for weeks.

Sources

• Reuters — “US campaign for control of Congress enters final weekend” (October 31, 2026)
• The Wall Street Journal — “Alaska Governor Orders Probe Over Same-Name Senate Race Controversy”
• CourtListener — United States v. State of Alaska, No. 3:26-cv-00376 (D. Alaska), complaint (October 22, 2026)