Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman called the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alaska over its Senate ballot the “most far-fetched, even inane” filing he’s seen from the department in a column posted to his Talking Feds Substack — and says it carries a pointed irony.
The suit targets Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a second Senate candidate who has nearly the same name as Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan. DOJ calls his run a “frivolous candidacy.”
The state courts have already litigated this issue in favor of allowing both Sullivans on the ballot. Litman noted the department doesn’t claim Alaska broke any provision of the National Voter Registration Act and rests its case on the law’s preamble.
The irony, he added, is that “if the federal government had any legitimate role in a case like this,” it would belong to the Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section, which enforced voting laws for decades. “But the Voting Section as anyone knew it is no more, a casualty of the administration’s wood-chipper assault.” Of about 30 career lawyers there when Trump took office, Litman said all but a couple have left, leaving “a bizarro anti–civil rights suit.”
He argued the complaint is “eye-poppingly preposterous in three separate ways”: it stretches a preamble into legal authority, asks a court to resolve a dispute that hasn’t occurred, and proposes a remedy requiring an inquiry into which votes were “meant” for the senator, which is unworkable with secret ballots. He added that Alaska already tried removing the second Sullivan, was reversed in court, and built a ballot designed to limit confusion.
President Donald Trump, for his part, has taken credit for the suit, saying, “I’m the one that said do it.”