Alaska Department of Law attorneys push back on Trump's election tampering
We can be thankful that Trump lackeys are not calling the shots on the state response to Donald Trump’s interference in Alaska’s U.S. Senate election to help Sen. Dan Sullivan, but that veteran and courageous attorneys in the Alaska Department of Law are managing to tell the truth in their court filings.
Trump, the Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney Michael Heyman, Gov. Mike Dunleavy and an assorted cast of other characters are using their official positions to try to swing the election to help Sullivan and keep Mary Peltola out of the U.S. Senate.
But state attorneys are correcting the lies told by Trump’s Department of Justice and pushing back against the election tampering scheme that is all about denying a free and fair election. Lawyers for Peltola, the Democrats and others are also trying to stop the federal encroachment on the rights of Alaskans.
There are a lot of court filings that Alaskans should read. Find links to them here at the Democracy Docket website, which is providing the best coverage of this situation.
I don’t know the extent of the internal strife within the state Department of Law, but it should be understood by Alaskans that so far the state has behaved in an ethical manner in opposing Trump’s illegal attack on our elections.
It is always possible that Dunleavy and the lawyers who take their orders from him will intervene and side with Trump in the courts. That would be a real crisis.
Trump’s attorneys have demanded in federal court that the state Division of Elections must separate all ballots in which votes are cast for Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr. so that a future investigation of some kind could determine whether voters chose the wrong Sullivan by mistake.
Even the most incompetent of Trump’s lawyers know that is impossible because the ballots are secret and there is no way to tie a voter to a specific ballot. Assistant U.S. Attorney E. Bryan Wilson and U.S. Attorney Michael Heyman, both in Anchorage, attached their names to this Trump balderdash.
Anyone who votes for the wrong Sullivan by mistake is not reading the ballot.
In his jabbering on cable TV, Dunleavy has echoed the lies of the Department of Justice and Trump‚—as he continues his increasingly desperate job auditions to please Trump—that a post-election investigation of the ballots will reveal all.
Dunleavy said that after the election, “That’s gonna be part of the followup is to see how many of those people when they voted, thought they were voting for the incumbent? How many of those people knew exactly who they were voting for? I mean it’s, it’s a dog’s breakfast to be honest with you. It’s a, It’s a, It’s a mess. And we’re gonna unravel it.”
Almost 80,000 Alaskans have already voted.
There is nothing to unravel. The ballot design is simple and it is easy to determine which Sullivan is the incumbent. The Sullivan campaign has made much of his middle initial. The state says there is no reason for voter confusion, given the ability of voters to ask for assistance, research the matter or vote for both Sullivans under ranked choice voting.
Even Sen. Dan Sullivan is telling his supporters to vote for both Sullivans.
“To guard against this danger, the United States seeks an order directing Defendants to preserve and segregate all ballots ranking Daniel J. Sullivan for the purposes of investigating whether such ranking was the product of voter confusion, should such an investigation become necessary. These modest precautionary measures will be impossible after Election Day, so there is good cause for expedited consideration,” Trump’s DOJ claims.
Trump’s lawyers say it is “common sense” that the ballot will confuse voters.
It took Alaska Department of Law attorneys Margaret Paton-Walsh and Laura Fox to correct the record for Alaskans.
“As for ballot segregation, voters’ ballots are co-mingled in the ballot box on Election Day. Election workers cannot ‘segregate all ballots ranking Daniel J. Sullivan’ during the voting process” without both violating the constitutional requirement that ballots are secret” and influencing how people vote, Paton-Walsh and Fox wrote in a document filed Friday.
“Regardless, as already explained, the ballots (whether segregated or not) will not reveal any voter’s reasons for voting for Daniel J.,” they said.
The State of Alaska court filings pushing back against Trump have been signed by Rachel Witty, the civil division director, of the Department of Law.
In a normal situation, Acting Attorney General Cori Mills would be signing the filings, but her absence suggests there are internal divisions within the department.
The Trump lawsuit “lacks any merit” and should be dismissed, the state says. That’s not what Dunleavy and Sullivan say.
The Trump lawyers are either lying or uninformed when they claim that a federal court order is needed to preserve the ballots. The Division of Elections preserves the ballots for 22 months after every election.
The Trump administration “waited until two weeks before Election Day to file a lawsuit about issues that arose months ago. It did not seek a preliminary injunction when it sued. The Division promptly moved to dismiss the complaint and the Court set expedited briefing. But rather than filing a substantive opposition to the Division’s motion to dismiss on the Court’s expedited schedule, the United States filed an amended complaint adding a second—but equally meritless—count (relying on the same underlying legal theory) and then asserted that the Division’s motion was moot, requiring the Division to file a second motion to dismiss. The United States has thus far only delayed the Court’s ability to evaluate its claims.”
It appears the Trump lawyers, the U.S. Attorney in Anchorage, Dunleavy, Sullivan and the rest of the Republicans are trying to keep the lawsuit alive for a few more days and generate as much confusion and distrust as possible about the vote Tuesday.
As to what is at stake, the Democracy Docket website puts it bluntly: This marks the first attempt by the Trump administration to block certification of a 2026 midterm election result if the administration’s preferred candidate loses.”
Trump, Sullivan, Dunleavy and the rest will be claiming corruption and cheating if Peltola wins and if the margin of victory is close. They will not stop trying to keep Peltola out of the Senate.
If Sullivan wins, however, they will claim there was no corruption and no cheating, following the familiar Trump pattern.
Attorney Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket, says we are in a constitutional crisis in which the Department of Justice has abandoned its duty and is actively targeting political opponents to disenfranchise voters and overturn election results.
“Meanwhile the legacy media treats this as clever strategy and both sides ignoring past norms,” Elias wrote on social media.
Elias highlighted this Washington Post story Saturday that does not treat the Trump interference in the Alaska election as an attack on a fundamental right and normalizes Trump’s behavior.
The Post story closed with this claim by the U.S. Attorney in Alaska, Michael Heyman, who was admitted to the Alaska Bar Association five months ago: “Every Alaskan deserves a fair election,” Alaska’s U.S. attorney, Michael J. Heyman, told reporters Friday. “And they’re going to get one.”
What the Post did not say is that Heyman, who has just inserted himself into this case, called a press conference to generate maximum publicity four days before an election.
This was a show of force, designed to communicate the anti-Peltola message that Trump, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Sullivan, Dunleavy and the Republican Party want to spread.
A competent U.S. attorney would never have done what Heyman did, recognizing it as election tampering by the Department of Justice. Heyman was there with the FBI, the Alaska State Troopers, etc., with no charges to announce and no specifics on what crimes took place or whether any crime took place.
This is the kind of behavior that is normal in authoritarian regimes.
Alaska news organizations should report it as such.
Heyman said he has recused himself before this because he wanted to be a federal judge, presumably one of those Trump judges who is unable to say who won the 2020 election.
At his Sullivan campaign rally in Wasilla, Trump praised Heyman as a good U.S. attorney.
Heyman claimed in his ill-advised press conference that he had no contact with the White House.
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