WASHINGTON/ANCHORAGE, Oct 31 (Reuters) – As the campaign for control of the US Congress reached its final weekend, the Trump administration stepped up its legal intervention in the Alaska Senate race while the number of Americans casting early ballots neared 50 million, a record for a midterm election.
The Department of Justice accelerated its criminal investigation in Alaska on Friday, following reports that aides to a Democratic Senate candidate recruited a retired schoolteacher from a remote fishing village to get on the ballot because he has the same name as the Republican incumbent.
The DOJ, acting on a civil lawsuit that President Donald Trump said he instigated, also filed further motions in an attempt to block the state of Alaska from certifying the Senate results if the Republican incumbent, Dan S. Sullivan, loses a close race on a ballot that includes the nonpartisan candidate Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.
The closely contested race in Alaska is seen as crucial for the Democrats if they hope to take control of the Senate from Trump’s Republicans in Tuesday’s vote.
PROSECUTOR ALLEGES ‘SHAM CANDIDATE’ IN KEY ALASKA RACE
It is one of 35 races in the 100-member Senate that will set the tone for Trump’s final two years in office. Also up for grabs are all 435 seats in the US House of Representatives.
Early voter participation this cycle has set a record. More than 49 million Americans have already cast ballots, either in person or by mail, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, up from nearly 46 million who voted before Election Day in the last midterms, in 2022.
A Democratic victory in one or both chambers could result in congressional investigations of the Trump administration, which for two years has enjoyed largely compliant Republican majorities.
Trump has been on a campaign blitz in multiple states over the past month but is not scheduled to travel on Saturday, when there will be a mash-up of American traditions: politics, Halloween and college football across the country. Trump returns to the campaign trail on Sunday in Kansas and Iowa.
The DOJ’s top prosecutor in Alaska, US Attorney Michael Heyman, said at a Friday press conference that a recent New York Times article about the supposed recruitment effort had driven a “surge” of FBI resources, adding that he had assigned several prosecutors to the case and that investigative steps were taking place “intensely and swiftly.”
The Times reported on Wednesday that aides to Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola recruited Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. to run. Heyman labeled him a “sham candidate” but declined to say what crime may have been committed.
The department had already filed its civil action but, Heyman said, “when the New York Times article hit, that’s additional information that accelerated what we’ve been doing.”
Peltola has denied knowing about any effort to recruit the second Sullivan. The retired teacher has denied coordinating with Peltola’s campaign.
ADMINISTRATION GETS INVOLVED IN RACES NATIONWIDE
The Trump administration has also sued California to try to prevent the counting of ballots cast by more than 20,000 registered voters who the administration alleged could be noncitizens. It has also sued roughly 30 states and the District of Columbia, seeking unredacted voter rolls, part of a pattern that has alarmed election officials.
A federal judge on Friday ordered the DOJ to stop threatening to prosecute California election officials who do not comply with the Trump administration’s directives regarding alleged voting by noncitizens.
Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the administration’s actions parallel the tactics undertaken by election deniers in the 2020 presidential election. While the administration is unlikely to win in court, he said, the efforts could create a political atmosphere that leads to official misconduct.
“It’s about creating uncertainty, sowing fear, distrust, chaos, hoping that you create the political circumstances in which maybe the lieutenant governor of Alaska does feel pressure to do something that they’re not supposed to do. Maybe the governor does start to question things, too,” Morales-Doyle said.
Even so, a bipartisan majority of US voters trust the overall electoral process, with 76% saying they are confident their ballots will be counted accurately, according to a September 30 to October 5 Reuters/Ipsos poll. Some 15% were not confident and the rest were not sure or did not answer the question. Confidence was about equally high among Republicans and Democrats.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward and David Morgan in Washington and Nathan Frandino in Anchorage; Writing by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Sergio Non and William Mallard)
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