State dismantles Trump's election interference case for Sullivan
Donald Trump and his corrupt attorney general are demanding that Alaska illegally show favoritism to Sen. Dan Sullivan in the U.S. Senate election against challenger Mary Peltola.
Sullivan is OK with the Trump plan to violate the Constitution of the United State, the Constitution of the State of Alaska and federal law. So is the Alaska Republican Party and the rest of the Trump cult, claiming federal overreach is fine, if it helps Sullivan win.
But all Alaskans should be grateful today that two key attorneys in the Alaska Department of Law have been allowed to give an honest and clear-headed assessment of Trump’s unconstitutional enterprise.
It’s a rare instance in which Gov. Mike Dunleavy did not put Trump politics ahead of the rule of law and allowed state professionals to do their job. I don’t know how or why this happened, but perhaps Carol Beecher, the director of the Division of Elections, made her voice heard and stood up for the rule of law.
Here is the state takedown of the feds by attorneys Margaret Paton-Walsh and Laura Fox, representing the Division of Elections.
The two attorneys work under Rachel Witty, the director of the civil division, whose name is also on the document, but the name of Acting Attorney General Cori Mills is notably absent.
Federal Judge Sharon Gleason is going to dismiss this case in short order. But Trump and Blanche are not about to stop. Gleason has given the Trump administration until Thursday at 3 p.m. to respond.
The federal claims by Trump and AG Tood Blanche about Alaska are laughable.
I suggest that everyone read the Trump lawsuit, a third-rate effort signed by E. Bryan Wilson, an assistant U.S. attorney in Anchorage, and compare it to the state response.
The federal lawsuit fails to cite a violation of federal law. The only law mentioned deals with voter registration, not with the conduct of elections. I don’t know Wilson, but he must know that he signed a load of piffle. It’s possible he had nothing to do with it.
So perhaps Wilson had to attach his name to this mess to remain employed with the federal government. Woodward didn’t return a phone call to the state attorney about the case.
Michael J. Heyman, the U.S. attorney in Anchorage, did not sign the document.
Was he embarrassed? Did he have a conflict of interest because he went to the Trump rally in Wasilla? Did he order Wilson to sign it for him? When Heyman was appointed in 2025 he claimed he wanted to uphold the rule of law.
It doesn’t appear that he has done that in this case.
He should either sign the next filing in the Trump lawsuit or resign.
Heyman has never been confirmed by the U.S. Senate. He was appointed in early 2025.
The big thing is that there has been no violation of federal law. There is no legit federal case. Just Trump vengeance.
Stanley E. Woodward Jr., mentinoed above, has been busy on Trump’s priority cases, like the ballroom and Trump’s obsession with making the East Potomac Golf Course fit for big golf tourneys, cutting down hundreds of trees without approval.
On October 16, Woodward signed this bit of nonsense trying to remove a judge who wasn’t showing proper respect to the Trump lawyers, accusing her of ‘histrionics.’ He claimed the judge had “unfairly questioned” the intelligence of Trump attorneys.
The judge replied with this pointed rebuttal. Trump called her a “crazed lunatic.”
Last spring Woodward signed off on Trump’s plan to create a $1.776 billion slush fund.
Perhaps he ordered subordinates in the Department of Justice, who know nothing about Alaska, to throw the Alaska lawsuit together and try to carry out the will of Trump, Blanche and Sullivan.
What they want to do is claim that a federal voter registration law be read as a “limitless grant of authority for federal interference in state-run elections,” the state lawyers say.
Paton-Walsh and Fox write that the case should be dismissed immediately “because the complaint has no legal basis.”
“Despite the lack of evidence of any problems (or indeed, any legal cause of action), the United States has sued to block certification of Alaska’s election result if ‘Senator Sullivan does not win the election.’ But the United States lacks authority to intervene in state elections at all, much less in support of a favored candidate,” they said.
Confusion about which Sullivan is which is not a problem because of the way they are listed on the ballot, the state says.
“If any Sullivan-supporting voter remains uncertain which Sullivan is which despite this clear differentiation on the ballot, the voter can ask for assistance from others or look up information about the candidates using a smart phone or an election pamphlet. And if the voter is still uncertain, Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system provides another solution: the voter can rank the Sullivans as his first and second choices. That way, if the voter’s first-ranked Sullivan is eliminated, his vote would transfer to the other Sullivan.”
“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.”
In other words, Trump and the U.S. attorney general are lying about ranked choice voting. Blanche is demanding an investigation to decide whether Alaska voters were confused and voted for the wrong Sullivan.
No such investigation is possible as that would violate the secret ballot.
“This would gravely threaten the integrity of the electoral process. It would require segregating ballots cast for Daniel J. and identifying them with the voters who cast them, so that those voters could later be interrogated about their intent. But that is not possible. Like every state in the union, Alaska protects the secrecy of the ballot by law, and such an investigation would require violating that secrecy. This would directly undermine electoral integrity.”
“The complaint speculates that a confused voter wishing to vote for the senator ‘might not rank Senator Sullivan at all,’ but alleges no facts to support the speculation that such voters exist in large numbers,” the state says.
“The United States is asking this Court to create and apply rules that Congress never enacted. This is unlawful: Congress’s power to regulate elections supersedes state law only ‘so far as it is exercised, and no farther.’ Here, Congress has not exercised its power at all,” the state says.
“The cases that the United States invokes about voter confusion—Bullock v. Carter, Jenness v. Fortson, and Lindsay v. Bowen—only confirm that this is an issue for the State to deal with, not the federal government.”
Paton-Walsh and Fox conclude by saying, “the Court should promptly dismiss the complaint with prejudice so that Alaska can proceed to administer its elections consistent with state and federal law and without unwarranted interference by the United States.”
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