“Trump administration sues to block possible Democratic win in Alaska Senate race”, 24 October 2026 (Photo via France 24 — the original report)
As it ran on the front
The letter the Department of Justice sent to counties across California this week is nicely done, and I don't say that about much coming out of Washington lately. Clean letterhead, the seal placed where a designer would want it, each sentence built short and plain, the way a lawyer builds a sentence for a judge to read twice. Somebody put real care into it. Then you get to the number sitting one lawsuit over — twenty thousand ballots in Los Angeles County alone that the same Department has asked a federal court to set aside before anyone finishes counting them — and the letterhead stops being the interesting part.
I wrote the word in quotes because he said it like it was carrying weight the rest of the sentence wasn't.…
…(cont) September 10th: a federal appeals court looked at an earlier version of this — an order restricting mail-in voting — and called it "likely unlawful." That's the First Circuit's language, not mine.
October 6th: the people who rate these races for a living moved Alaska's Senate seat from "Toss-up" to "Leans Democrat."
October 13th, a Tuesday: the Department sent Los Angeles County a thumb drive with a password written on it by hand, and asked the county to check names against it. The county said no. Two days later, the Department sued the state of California to stop the count instead.
I tried this out on my own life, the way I do. Picture the toll plaza, the EZ-Pass lane, and the gate doesn't lift. Somebody waves you to the shoulder and says your transponder's on a list of ones that might not be yours — can't say why, can't say for how long, the bridge stays open, just not to you yet. That's what "segregate" means when it isn't your glovebox doing the sorting. It's a county clerk's office, and the ballot doesn't move until somebody with a badge clears it.
And today: the Department sued to block Alaska from certifying its Senate race, but only if the Republican loses it. A columnist on Fox Business said this week that the man running against the Senator happens to also be named Dan Sullivan, which he called "a whole bowl of wrong." I went looking for a second source on that. The wire service covering the lawsuit describes the race as two Republicans confusing voters with similar names. The ratings service that moved the race in October names the Democrat in it as Mary Peltola. I've read all three descriptions twice now and still can't get two of them to agree on who's running. Which one is on the ballot?
So that's the ledger as I have it: one letter, two lawsuits, two states, zero proven fraudulent votes in any of the three. Is that the same Department a federal appeals court already told, back in September, that the last version of this was likely against the law?
Oh — one more thing, before I let you go, since the page is already open. I'm sorry to come back to this, but the promise in the spring wasn't that his Department wouldn't block a certification — it was that it wouldn't do it the wrong way. I've been through the whole notebook since, front to back, and I still can't find the page where one of these three was done the right way. Can you?
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“They promise, on the record, not to improperly block a state's count, then run three different versions of blocking it before a single fraudulent vote shows up: a letter telling counties to set ballots aside, a lawsuit freezing twenty thousand of them in Los Angeles, and a second lawsuit today aimed only at the one race their guy is currently losing. That's not an integrity check, that's a kill switch they reach for when the math turns against them. Twenty thousand ballots in one county is a lot of people's votes sitting in a drawer because a map turned the wrong color.”
“Look, nobody's blocking anything, the Department is simply making sure every ballot that gets counted is a legitimate one — which is why we're asking a court to stop counting twenty thousand of them until we're sure. And the Alaska situation is just about voter clarity, two men named Dan Sullivan on one ballot, which we also happened to notice right around the time our guy started losing. Did I say "right around the time"? That's — that's not how I meant that to come out.”
US President Donald Trump said Friday that he had instructed his administration to file a lawsuit to block the certification of the US Senate race in Alaska if Republican Senator Dan Sullivan loses, arguing that voters would be confused because two Republicans on the ballot have similar names. The legal battle is ramping up questions…
Republicans' reconciliation package puts $70 billion into ICE's department NBC News, May 2026
The move by the Justice Department to try and preemptively block Alaska’s Senate results if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses stunned officials in both parties.
The DOJ disbanded its crypto enforcement team in April 2025 and ordered inconsistent investigations closed — while the president's family runs a crypto business. CNBC, 8 April 2025 (Blanche memo)
Washington Examiner columnist Joe Concha slammed Democrats in Alaska over voter corruption, saying they “put up a guy named Dan Sullivan” with a different middle name to “confuse” voters.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
