The US Justice Department has asked a court to block Alaska’s Senate election results in advance if Republican senator Dan Sullivan loses, escalating Donald Trump’s efforts to assert federal control over elections just 12 days before polling day.
The extraordinary legal move has stunned current and former election officials from both parties. Trump said on Friday that he personally authorised the action, telling reporters: “I’m the one that said ‘Do it.’”
The department said its claim was not an attempt to stop Alaska’s election. In a statement posted on social media, it said it was “seeking to protect election integrity” under the National Voter Registration Act and to ensure that “the will of Alaska voters is respected”.
Legal experts expect the application to fail, as courts have rejected or halted several other efforts by the administration to influence how elections are run.
Ben Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election law expert who worked on George W Bush’s presidential campaigns, said the Alaska filing had “zero basis in the law”. He described it as “a real desperation play”.
Justice Department election intervention
The Justice Department has filed lawsuits in nearly every state seeking access to voter files. Trump has also revived his long-running campaign against mail voting, sought to link anti-terrorism funding to the way states administer elections and threatened to withhold federal election funding from states that refuse to alter voter registration forms.
A Republican-backed bill requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship at polling stations has stalled in the Senate. Federal judges have blocked the administration’s attempts involving anti-terrorism and election funding, while the Supreme Court ultimately stopped its effort to restrict mail voting.
Gabriel Sterling, a Republican former senior Georgia election official who challenged Trump’s false claims of fraud after the 2020 election, said the Alaska lawsuit could be intended to support claims that legal challenges had prevented Republicans from winning.
“I think there is an attempt to lay a foundation to say, ‘If we had won these lawsuits, we would have won the election,’” Mr Sterling said. “So, for them, filing and losing for them is the same difference, tactically speaking, potentially.”
Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, accused the Justice Department of acting as “the president’s lawyers” and said the department was behaving in a “monstrously political way”.
“This attempt in Alaska, if it comes to Arizona, will also fail,” Mr Fontes said.
Washington state attorney general Nick Brown described the filing as part of an effort to control the election and influence its outcome in favour of Mr Trump and the Republican Party. He said he was concerned the administration could challenge the midterm results.
“That is not hypothetical,” Mr Brown said. “This is what the president has done for years now, and he has the entire power of government, and most importantly, the Department of Justice around elections, acting at his request.”
Republican officials have largely remained silent. Four statewide Republican election offices declined to comment on the Alaska action, while the others did not respond to requests for a reaction.
Stephen Richer, the former Republican chief election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County, said Republican officials faced a significant political risk if they opposed Mr Trump over election matters.
“The survival rate politically of people who oppose Donald Trump on this issue is not great if you’re Republican,” he said.
A current Georgia Republican election official, speaking anonymously about internal discussions, said the state was prepared to resist any federal intervention.
“Bring it on,” the official said. “I think there’s zero credible way for any entity, much less the DOJ, to say that the election results in Georgia are suspect.”
The dispute comes after years of tension between the federal government and state election authorities. Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson, recently accused the Justice Department of publicly suggesting that state secretaries were failing to do their jobs.
Her office was later told that Justice Department election monitors would be sent to Utah. It responded by reminding polling staff that observers must not interfere with voting and by issuing guidance on dealing with law enforcement or legal demands.
“In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor the threats were all external,” Ms Henderson told CBS News. “But now we also have threats coming from within our own government.”
