VOTEWIRE ANALYSIS
Three days before an election that will decide control of Congress, the Justice Department escalated its legal pressure on election officials — and a federal judge told it to stop. The ballots are already in. The question is whether anyone will be allowed to second-guess them.
Friday was the day the final weekend stopped being about persuasion and became about pressure. The Justice Department accelerated a criminal investigation in Alaska's Senate race, after reports that aides to Democratic candidate Mary Peltola recruited a retired schoolteacher who shares a name with the Republican incumbent, Dan S. Sullivan. The other man on the ballot is Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., running as a nonpartisan. At a Friday press conference, the Justice Department's top prosecutor in Alaska, U.S. Attorney Michael Heyman, said the reporting had driven a "surge" of FBI resources, that he had assigned several prosecutors to the case, and that investigative steps were taking place "intensely and swiftly." He labeled the second Sullivan a "sham candidate" — but declined to say what crime may have been committed.
Both people at the center of the allegation deny it. Peltola has denied knowing about any effort to recruit the second Sullivan. The retired teacher has denied coordinating with her campaign. And alongside the criminal investigation, the department has filed a civil action seeking to block Alaska from certifying its Senate results if Sullivan loses a close race on a ballot that includes the second Sullivan.
Before a single Election Day vote is cast in Alaska, the federal government is already litigating the conditions under which it would accept a loss there.
Alaska is not an isolated case. It is the sharp end of a nationwide pattern. The administration has sued California to try to prevent the counting of ballots cast by more than 20,000 registered voters it alleges could be noncitizens. It has sued roughly 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking unredacted voter rolls.
And this is where Friday's second story matters, because it is the one that actually protects voters. A federal judge ordered the Justice Department to stop threatening to prosecute California election officials who do not comply with the administration's directives about alleged voting by noncitizens. U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson, ruling in a lawsuit brought by election workers' unions and other groups, issued a temporary restraining order barring the department from demanding that local officials remove voters from statewide rolls, refuse ballots to specific voters, or segregate ballots cast in the midterms based on the administration's list of alleged noncitizen voters. Her reasoning was blunt about the stakes and the calendar: "Because the public has a paramount interest in ensuring that election officials and workers are able to carry out their work in accordance with federal law and election procedure, and the official day of the Elections is only a couple of days away, the balance of the equities and public interest weigh in Plaintiffs' favor."
That ruling names who actually runs American elections. Not the Justice Department. Not a presidential campaign. Local election officials and poll workers — working people doing a temporary, high-scrutiny job — who open the polling places, check the rolls, and count the ballots. Threatening those workers with prosecution days before an election is a pressure tactic aimed at the people with the least power in the system. The judge's order says, in effect: do your lawful job, and the law will cover you while you do it.
The Brennan Center's Sean Morales-Doyle put the strategy in its proper frame, saying the administration's actions parallel the tactics undertaken by election deniers in the 2020 presidential election, and warning that even efforts unlikely to win in court could sow uncertainty, fear, and distrust — and pressure officials into acting as though the administration had already won.
Here is the counter-evidence, already in the record. More than 49 million Americans have already cast ballots, in person or by mail, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab — a midterm record, up from nearly 46 million who voted before Election Day in 2022. And voters, for all the noise, still broadly trust the process they are participating in: a September 30 to October 5 poll found 76 percent of voters confident their ballots will be counted accurately, with confidence about equally high among Republicans and Democrats.
That is the progressive read, and it cuts both ways. The courts holding the line is good news, but a temporary restraining order is not a settlement — it is a pause, days before the vote, in a fight the administration has shown every sign of continuing after it. The 35 Senate races and all 435 House seats on Tuesday's ballot will decide whether the next two years bring congressional oversight of this administration or two more years of compliant majorities. A Democratic victory in one or both chambers would mean investigations the current majorities have not pursued. That is precisely why the pressure is arriving now.
So the task for the next three days is practical, sharpened by Friday's news. If you have not voted, vote — early where it is still open, on Election Day where it is not. And the election workers doing this work under threat of prosecution are the people standing between your vote and the pressure campaign. The courts drew a line on Friday. On Tuesday, voters get to draw one too.