Blanche defends Trump-ordered lawsuit over Alaska Senate election certification

Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the Justice Department's lawsuit on Sunday seeking to block certification of Alaska's Senate election if Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan narrowly loses.

The lawsuit, filed last week, cites what it argues is likely voter confusion over the name Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired teacher also on the ballot. The DOJ said confusion over the two Sullivans could help former Alaska Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola, who is narrowly ahead in polls just over a week from Election Day, win the election.

"What we're asking the court to do is make sure that after the election, if it's clear that there was confusion, if it's clear, and that's for a court to decide at a later date if there's litigation ... and that confusion led to an unjust, improper result that is not the will of the Alaskan voter, we want to make sure that the Alaskan system and the Alaskan state courts and the Alaskan electoral process can understand that in a way that lets them do the right thing," Blanche said on CNN's "State of the Union."

"Never before have opponents gone to such lengths to try and thwart and cheat in an election as they're doing in this case," he said.

The DOJ's lawsuit says that the potential for voter confusion exists and Alaska should not certify the election if "(1) Senator Sullivan does not win the election; and (2) had all votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan been cast instead for Senator Sullivan and Alaska's rank-choice process played out accordingly, Senator Sullivan would have won the election."

Alaska applies a top-four primary system to select candidates for the general election. The November general election uses ranked-choice voting.

Ranked-choice voting lets voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of votes in the first round of counting, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Voters who ranked the eliminated candidate first then have their second choice counted and added to that candidate's total. This continues until a majority winner — or the candidate with more than half of the vote — wins.

Republicans have argued for months that Daniel J. Sullivan is a Democratic plant intended to confuse voters and have sought to remove him from the ballot. Democrats have maintained they have no connection to the candidate, and Sullivan himself has denied running to confuse voters.

The Alaska Division of Elections briefly removed Daniel J. Sullivan in June, before a state court ordered his name returned to the ballot. The state Supreme Court upheld that decision.

President Donald Trump, who has long made claims of voter fraud without evidence, said he ordered the DOJ's lawsuit himself.

Democratic groups and voting rights advocates, including Peltola's campaign, are seeking to join the lawsuit to stop the DOJ's effort to block certification of the election if Sen. Sullivan loses. The groups argue the executive branch lacks the legal authority to intervene in state-run elections and is attempting an unprecedented override of state election administration, with early voting already underway.

"In an unprecedented pre-emptive strike on democratic elections, the Department of Justice—acting on the President's personal orders—demands that this Court enjoin the certification of the ongoing U.S. Senate election, but only if the President's preferred candidate loses," the motion to intervene reads. "But the federal government has no power to impose that Hobson's choice on the people of this State."

Alaska is seen as one of the best chances for a Democratic flip in the Nov. 3 elections, which will determine control of Congress for the remainder of Trump's term. Trump has been barnstorming competitive states in recent weeks as the polls favor Democrats to win control of the House of Representatives and potentially flip the Senate.

Democrats and voting rights advocates have long feared that Trump — who denied his election loss to former President Joe Biden in 2020, leading to a violent riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — would attempt to meddle in the midterm contest to save narrow Republican majorities in Congress.

Blanche bristled on Sunday when asked whether the lawsuit aimed to sway the election in Alaska toward Republicans.

"That is crazy," Blanche said, pressed on CNN about whether the president is laying the groundwork for a "doomsday" scenario in which he tries to overturn election results.

"We're not laying any groundwork for the president to do that ... the groundwork that we are laying is for the state of Alaska, if it becomes an issue after the election, will have the ability to determine whether there was confusion that violates the law in determining who the senator should be."