Trump told the Justice Department to sue to block Alaska's certification if the Republican narrowly loses; the complaint named zero ballots, and the vote is two days off.

…(cont) The first symptom was reported on 31 August, when the Washington Examiner wrote that Alaska Democrats had found a man willing to run for the Senate seat under a name all but identical to the incumbent's — Dan J. Sullivan, where the Republican holding the seat is Dan S. Sullivan. One letter apart. On 9 October the president posted that Alaska's voting system was stupid: "How stupid are we to do this?" On 14 October he urged Alaskans to vote for the "real" Dan Sullivan and said his administration was looking into the other one.

On 23 October the Justice Department went to federal court and asked it to withhold certification of the Senate result if the Republican incumbent loses. The condition is the document. The suit does not ask a court to protect the counting; it asks a court to protect one of the two available outcomes. It named no ballot at all — not a penny-ante handful, zero. On 26 October the president said he had directed the filing himself, and added the word narrowly.

Peltola's lawyers moved to dismiss on 27 October. On 28 October Senator Lisa Murkowski endorsed the Democratic candidate for governor, passing over the president's own pick, which is one senator and not a state.

The grounds arrived afterward, in instalments, the way grounds do. On 29 October the Times reported that Peltola's campaign had recruited the second Sullivan, and the Department answered its own lawsuit with a fresh wave of subpoenas in what it called an "ongoing criminal investigation." Law enforcement surged. On Friday a filing asked that every ballot ranking Daniel J. Sullivan be segregated for voter confusion — segregated, not counted. Also on Friday the United States Attorney in Anchorage, Michael Heyman, confirmed a criminal investigation and a civil one and said he is "not making any assumptions on whether a crime has been committed or not."

Four probes, state and federal. Zero charges. Zero ballots. One on-air clarification that the thing is not illegal. At a rally Friday, Mary Peltola denied any involvement in the "Decoy Dan" ballot-stacking her campaign stands accused of, the second straight week she has said it. On Saturday Alaska's own attorneys filed their answer: the ballots cannot be moved. That is not a refusal. That is arithmetic and geography.

It is preceded in death by Brasília, this same month. Flávio Bolsonaro lost Brazil's run-off, threatened to annul it, and left for the United States with his family, with Trump and his aides seeing to it that he could enter. A letter posted briefly under his name called him president elect; an ally said afterward the phrasing came from ChatGPT. He has called himself leader of Brazil. The president in Washington has not said who won.

It is survived by the surge of agents; by the thousand election monitors the head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, has said she hopes to send, which the NAACP sued over on 7 October; and by the 250-foot arch for the country's 250th anniversary, whose excavation the Interior Secretary announced on 4 September and which the president posted on 20 September would incorporate a "top grade military complex" — snipers, drones — at the military's request. Arlington County sued on 9 October. Washington and Virginia sued the National Park Service on Saturday. Concrete keeps better than agreements.

In lieu of flowers, vote on Tuesday. It is two days off, and a count too large to argue with is the only medicine left on the shelf.