Democrats filed a lawsuit Friday as early voting failures affected thousands of Alaskans in villages “key to Democratic hopes” just days out from the midterms, The New York Times reported Saturday.
Filed in Anchorage Superior Court, the lawsuit alleges that 18 early voting sites in rural Alaska had either “failed to open, opened late, maintained irregular hours or lacked ballots altogether,” the Times reported. The early voting period in Alaska began on Oct. 19 and is scheduled to end on Monday, Nov. 2.
As noted by the Times, elections in the Last Frontier state are “routinely decided by a few thousand or even a few hundred votes.” Recent polls show Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola narrowly leading her Republican opponent, Sen. Dan S. Sullivan (R-AK).
Democratic State Sen. Bill Wielechowski wrote Alaska election officials earlier this month about the matter, arguing there was “no legal excuse for the failure to open” the early voting sites. Democrats’ lawsuit suggests that despite Wielechowski’s letter, the matter had not been addressed.
“In some communities, local workers reportedly resigned without replacements, while others had not received ballots or were unaware they were supposed to host voting,” the Times’ report reads. “According to the complaint, some voters traveled to their designated voting location ‘by boat or by plane’ only to be turned away.”
According to the Times, the aim of Democrats’ lawsuit is to ensure all of Alaska’s remote polling sites are fully open on Election Day next week.
The lawsuit also came roughly a week after the Justice Department filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent Alaska state officials from certifying election results if Sullivan loses his reelection bid, with the core of the DOJ’s complaint centering on the confusion, the agency argued, that voters may have with two candidates named Sullivan on the ballot.