A federal judge on Sunday, November 1, 2026, dismissed the Justice Department lawsuit that sought to block certification of Alaska's Senate race if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses, handing the Trump administration a significant legal defeat just two days before voters decide control of the United States Senate.
United States District Judge Sharon Gleason ruled in Anchorage that the relief sought by the federal government was not workable, because so many Alaskans have already voted and their ballots can no longer be separated from one another or traced back to individual voters. The decision removes, at least for now, the threat that Alaska would be barred from certifying a result in one of the closest and most closely watched Senate contests in the country.
The ruling, released on Sunday, ended — for the moment — a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department less than two weeks before the November 3 midterm elections, while early voting was already under way. The department had asked a federal court to intervene in Alaska's ranked-choice Senate election, arguing that the presence of two candidates with similar names on the ballot created a risk that voters would be confused and that votes intended for the incumbent would be lost.
On the ballot, the incumbent is listed as Dan S. Sullivan, a Republican, and marked as the incumbent. The other candidate is Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired teacher with no party affiliation. Peltola, a Democrat and former United States representative, is the leading challenger. Tuesday's ranked-choice election also includes candidates who have done little campaigning.
Gleason, who was appointed to the federal bench by former Democratic President Barack Obama, rejected the government's case in blunt terms. She wrote that the relief the United States seeks is "infeasible" because many voters have already cast their ballots, and those ballots have been mixed together to the point where they cannot be matched to specific voters.
"More fundamentally, the United States provides no workable plan as to how it proposes to segregate ballots cast for Daniel J. Sullivan on Election Day and then conduct a court-ordered unspecified 'investigation' of those ballots in a manner that would preserve voter secrecy," she wrote.
Attorneys for the state, for Peltola's campaign and for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had argued that the case had no legal basis and amounted to interference in a state-run election. The Alaska Department of Law, representing state elections officials, had filed a scathing response to the federal complaint, calling it "meritless".
Reports of the ruling on Sunday said Justice Department attorneys are expected to appeal. An appeal, however, would face the same practical obstacle Gleason identified: by the time any higher court ruled, the election would be over and the ballots already counted.
The dispute over the two Sullivans did not begin with the Justice Department lawsuit. Republican-backed efforts to keep the retired teacher off the ballot were rejected by state courts, including the Alaska Supreme Court, before the August open primary, in which he appeared as Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., with no party affiliation. Peltola placed first in that primary, followed by the senator. Daniel J. Sullivan received about 2.5 percent of the primary vote, enough to finish in the top four and qualify for the November 3 ranked-choice election.
The row intensified in the final week of the campaign. A New York Times report on Wednesday, October 28, alleged that members of Peltola's campaign had helped recruit the second Sullivan to run as a spoiler candidate in an attempt to draw votes away from the senator. The report appears to have prompted the Trump administration's renewed legal push to bar Alaska from certifying its election results if Senator Sullivan lost.
Peltola has insisted she had nothing to do with recruiting the other Sullivan. Her campaign said it "has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign", a statement similar to one it released after Daniel J. Sullivan launched his bid. "I am not interested in tricking voters," Peltola said at a recent campaign event. Asked on Friday by KTUU whether someone on her campaign could have been involved in recruiting him, she said: "I have no idea. I honestly have no idea."
Daniel J. Sullivan said in June, shortly after entering the race, that he had had no contact with the campaign about running. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Times report.
The Justice Department filed its lawsuit on Thursday, October 29, and sought a decision before Monday, November 2. On the same day, the department escalated a criminal investigation over the same-named candidates, issuing a raft of new grand jury subpoenas, according to a person familiar with the matter. The FBI also began contacting people who donated to Daniel J. Sullivan, some of whom told the Associated Press that agents asked whether they had been misled about which candidate they were supporting. Alaska filed its motion to dismiss on Saturday, calling the federal request "disturbing and impossible" because of ballot secrecy.
Alaska also told the court it had taken "significant steps" to distinguish the two Sullivans on the ballot. Voters who might still be confused could ask for help or look up candidate biographies and other information in state-distributed election pamphlets, the state said.
Gleason's reasoning rested on two pillars: practicality and constitutional structure. On practicality, the judge said the federal government had no plan that could be carried out. Ballots already cast cannot be unmixed, and any attempt to investigate how individual voters intended to vote would threaten the secrecy of the ballot, a foundation of American elections.
On structure, Gleason wrote that the administration's attempt to block certification ran counter to the Constitution, which gives states the authority to run elections. She also cited the Supreme Court's Purcell principle, which holds that federal courts should generally not change election rules too close to an election, precisely because late changes risk confusing voters and administrators alike.
Alaska's ranked voting system, the state argued, already offers a solution to possible confusion. Voters may rank the two Sullivans as their first and second choices if they wish. "That way, if the voter's first-ranked Sullivan is eliminated, his vote would transfer to the other Sullivan," attorneys Rachel Witty, Margaret Paton Walsh and Laura Fox wrote. "The voter's vote would not 'be transferred to Peltola' as the complaint asserts, unless the voter chose to rank Peltola as his next choice instead of the other Sullivan."
The Justice Department had cited the preamble of the National Voter Registration Act in its case. Gleason found that the federal government did not have the ability to bring the lawsuit on that basis, according to reports of the ruling. The decision is the latest in a series of setbacks for the Trump administration's efforts to assert a greater federal role in elections, which under the Constitution are administered by the states.
President Donald Trump has said he ordered the lawsuit to be filed because, of the four Senate candidates on Alaska's ballot, two have similar names. Trump has for years railed against Alaska's use of ranked-choice voting in general elections, although Republican state leaders have said that, while they do not like ranked voting, they want voters to "rank every Republican" on this year's ballot, especially in a high-stakes governor's race featuring one Democrat and three Republicans.
Senator Sullivan's own response on Sunday drew a sharp contrast with the administration's legal position. Appearing on CNN's State of the Union, he vowed to accept the outcome of Tuesday's election.
"I'm going to accept the election results," Sullivan said. He added that he was confident of winning, while accusing his Democratic opponent of cheating. "My opponent and [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer and his aides are showing complete disrespect for Alaskans, complete disdain in recognising that they couldn't run on their record, so they had to cheat. And now that that's been exposed," he said.
Sullivan also doubted Peltola's denials about the recruitment allegation. "There is no way this went on for a year that they weren't informing her," he told CNN. "She got caught lying, and she's still lying to the Alaskan people, the media, to all of us."
On Saturday night, Sullivan handed out candy at a "trunk-or-treat" event at a recreation centre north of Anchorage, where he quipped that his costume was "the real Dan Sullivan" — a joke that captured, in miniature, the confusion at the heart of the case.
Peltola's campaign, for its part, has framed the entire episode as a distraction. Peltola has called attention to what she describes as the main issues facing Alaskans, including high prices, and her campaign has repeatedly denied any involvement in recruiting the second Sullivan.
State elections officials, meanwhile, welcomed the legal outcome in substance if not in words: their argument, accepted by Gleason, was that Alaska's system already protects voters, that the ballots cannot be unmixed, and that a federal court should not rewrite the rules two days before an election.
The Alaska race is one of seven key toss-ups that will likely decide whether Republicans keep their majority in the Senate. Republicans currently hold a 53-47 majority, and 35 Senate seats, along with all 435 House seats, are on the ballot on Tuesday. A court order blocking certification in Alaska would have thrown one of those decisive races into legal limbo, with no clear end point, and would have set a precedent for federal intervention in state elections on the eve of voting.
Gleason's ruling matters beyond Alaska for the same reason. The Trump administration has pressed states for voter-registration data and argued that stricter federal measures are needed to ensure public confidence in the vote. Courts have repeatedly pushed back, and Sunday's decision adds a fresh, fact-specific reason: when voting is already under way, the remedy the government sought was not merely controversial, but impossible to carry out without breaking ballot secrecy.
For Alaskan voters, the practical effect is straightforward. They can vote on Tuesday knowing that the state's certification process is not, at this moment, blocked by a federal court order. For the campaigns, the ruling shifts the contest back to where both sides say it belongs: the ballot box, and the ranked-choice count that follows.
The ruling also sharpens the political contrast inside the Republican camp. The incumbent senator says he will accept the result; the administration that backed his party's legal challenge sought to hold certification hostage to a hypothetical loss. That gap, visible on national television on Sunday, is likely to feature in the final two days of campaigning.
Alaskans vote on Tuesday, November 3, in a ranked-choice election. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the lowest-placed candidate is eliminated and their voters' next choices are counted, until one candidate passes 50 percent. That process means the two Sullivans' supporters can rank both men, in either order, without their vote automatically flowing to Peltola.
The Justice Department is expected to appeal Gleason's dismissal, but any appeal would run into the same timing problem: the election will have happened, and the ballots will have been commingled further. A separate criminal investigation, including grand jury subpoenas and FBI interviews with donors, continues independently of the civil lawsuit, and could still produce developments after Election Day.
Certification, if the result is close, will still be watched closely. Alaska's elections officials have said they will follow the state's ranked-choice count and certification timetable. The campaigns, meanwhile, have two days of final rallies and canvassing left, with national attention fixed on whether Republicans hold the Senate or Democrats take control for the final two years of Trump's presidency.
What did the judge decide in the Alaska Senate lawsuit? Judge Sharon Gleason dismissed the Justice Department lawsuit on Sunday, November 1, 2026, ruling that blocking certification of Alaska's Senate race was "infeasible" because many voters had already voted and their ballots could not be separated or traced to individuals.
Why did the Justice Department sue? The department argued that votes for retired teacher Daniel J. Sullivan might have been intended for Republican incumbent Dan S. Sullivan, and asked the court to block certification if the incumbent lost, pending an investigation into those ballots.
Who are the two Dan Sullivans? Dan S. Sullivan is the Republican incumbent senator. Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. is a retired teacher with no party affiliation who qualified for the November 3 ranked-choice election after winning about 2.5 percent in the August primary.
What did Senator Sullivan say about the result? On CNN on Sunday, Sullivan said: "I'm going to accept the election results," while accusing Democrat Mary Peltola and her allies of cheating and disputing her denials about the recruitment allegation.
When is the Alaska Senate election? Tuesday, November 3, 2026, as part of the midterm elections in which 35 Senate seats and all 435 House seats are on the ballot. Republicans currently hold a 53-47 Senate majority.
Related coverage: FBI Visits Alaska Donors as Trump Calls Sullivan Case Top-Level Voter Fraud, Peltola Asks Judge to Toss DOJ Certification Case in Alaska and DOJ Seeks Alaska Ballot Segregation in Dan Sullivan Senate Race.
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