Trump demands Sen. Dan Sullivan be declared winner
I was wrong in guessing that Donald Trump would lose interest in tampering with the Alaska U.S. Senate race, distracted by the thrashing he took in the Congressional races Tuesday and seek solace in his ballroom.
Today Trump claimed that Sen. Dan Sullivan should be declared the winner, which would be unconstitutional and illegal.
Tens of thousands of votes have yet to be counted. No one knows for sure what the final result will be.
But Sullivan should speak up and denounce this blatant federal overreach, but he’s a Trump sycophant who is incapable of doing what’s right.
Imagine what Sullivan would have said had Joe Biden made a similar deranged demand.
This is in contrast to the “Make a Wish” office of the Sullivan campaign, which released a so-called “analysis” that shows Sullivan overcoming Peltola’s 626-vote lead and winning the race through redistributed ranked choice voting by 328 votes.
This is an idiotic exercise. Here is the alleged “analysis.”
About 70,000 early, questioned and absentee votes have yet to be counted. Until those ballots are in, it makes no sense to draw definitive conclusions about the ranked choice voting rounds.
Pollster Ivan Moore of Alaska Survey Research predicts “Peltola will win these easily,” putting her over the top.
Sullivan stands to gain about 2,700 votes from the ranked choice voting process so far, while Peltola picks up about 1,900, according to a review of the data, but until the 70,000 other votes are counted, the 328-vote claim is bogus.
With its “analysis” of the 328-vote path to victory, Sullivan may be trying to set himself up for a legal challenge to the election results.
Peltola released a statement saying, “Every Alaskan’s vote will be counted, and when the process is complete, Mary Peltola will be Alaska’s next United States Senator.”
On Election Day, Sullivan said: “Our campaign is feeling really strong. We have been campaigning really hard. Some of you have been covering our events. We’ve had great turnout, great rallies, tons of energy, all through last night.”
“There is no doubt that people are mad. We are witnessing the biggest election cheating scandal in the history of the State of Alaska, maybe one of the biggest in the U.S. Senate’s history,” said Sullivan.
That is nonsense.
A day earlier, he told a rally that Peltola was “bleeding support. People are puling Peltola signs out of their yards. Right? They are saying. Hey, wait a minute. I did not sign up for corruption. Right? I did not sign up for cheating with Chuck Schumer. So we have the energy. And if we win, the Mat-Su Valley, if the Mat-Su Valley turns out tomorrow, the way it’s been turning out in terms of early voting, which is off the charts. If the Mat-Su Valley turns out tomorrow wins, Alaska wins and America wins.”
Alaska loses and America loses when Sullivan stays silent while the president intervenes for his favored candidate, while not allowing all the votes to be counted.
Alaska loses and American loses when Sullivan stays silent when the attorney general of the United States, Todd Blanche, follows Trump’s orders and claims "There's a scenario where Sen. Sullivan could lose, but really he didn't lose."
Gov. Mike Dunleavy is still going on Fox News claiming that “this is going to come down to potentially just a few votes. And again, if there’s any wrongdoing, any criminal activity that the investigation uncovers, this could drag out even longer.”
Dunleavy should read the court filings made by the Department of Law in the Trump lawsuit that was tossed out of court. The state lawyers did a fine job showing the Trump intervention was illegal and unwarranted.
“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.”
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