What Trump’s Prosecution Call Means for Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola

The Trump administration has launched an extraordinary last-minute effort to contest Alaska’s Senate race—despite the fact that voters have not yet cast their ballots.

The contest was thrown into turmoil this week after a bombshell report alleged that Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign helped put forward a candidate sharing the name of her Republican rival, Dan Sullivan, potentially giving her an advantage at the polls.

Peltola’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee are now the subjects of a criminal investigation launched by Alaska’s Republican governor. Investigators are examining allegations that they helped recruit the candidate dubbed “Decoy” Dan Sullivan.

Separately, a civil lawsuit filed by the Justice Department earlier this year is considering whether Alaska would be able to certify the election results if the incumbent, Dan Sullivan, is defeated.

The Cook Political Report has classified the Alaska Senate contest as a toss-up. With control of Congress potentially at stake, the race is being closely watched by both parties.

President Donald Trump has urged prosecutors to charge Peltola following the report, accusing Democrats of election “fraud” and calling for both Peltola and the “Decoy” Dan to be disqualified from the ballot.

However, legal specialists told the Daily Mail that the Justice Department’s civil case—and Trump’s demand for a federal criminal prosecution—face significant obstacles and are unlikely to progress.

Rick Hasen, a University of California, Los Angeles, professor who specializes in election law, said a criminal prosecution would rest on a weak legal foundation and would almost certainly fail.

Hasen said political parties routinely support rival candidates for strategic reasons, such as Republicans backing Green Party contenders or Democrats supporting Libertarians. He described the Alaska situation as an unusually aggressive example of a familiar tactic.

Although the Justice Department could still attempt to bring charges, Hasen said he believed such a case would not withstand legal scrutiny.

He also said the second Dan Sullivan would probably invoke his First Amendment rights. Those protections, Hasen argued, would likely carry more weight than any conspiracy theory based on the candidate’s alleged motives for entering the race.

“I don’t see how the government could criminalize his running for office for having impure motives.”

Even if prosecutors could establish the underlying allegations, Hasen noted that accepting such a theory could make ordinary campaign tactics criminal whenever a party supports an opposing candidate it believes would be easier to defeat later. Strategic efforts of that kind, he said, occur frequently in American politics.

Using a candidate’s name to create voter confusion is also far from unprecedented in U.S. elections.

During Washington’s 2024 Democratic gubernatorial primary, two additional candidates shared the name of Democratic state Attorney General Bob Ferguson. According to CNN, both candidates were paid by a Republican activist who hoped their presence would confuse voters.

The tactic dates back even further. In the mid-1950s, John Francis Kennedy used the fame of Massachusetts Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy to win the office of state treasurer, despite running without a public campaign or backing from a political party.

The Justice Department’s separate civil action appears to center, at least partly, on potential conspiracy allegations, adding another legal front to the increasingly contentious Alaska Senate race.

That being whether Democrats knowingly recruited Dan J Sullivan on Peltola’s behalf, as part of a broader effort to confuse and or deprive Alaskans of their votes. Or whether Dan J Sullivan himself knowingly aimed to deprive voters.

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Derek Muller, an election law expert and professor at Notre Dame Law, described the Alaska civil lawsuit as ‘one of the worst’ he had ever seen.

The attempt to invalidate the state election results in the event of Democratic win is seen as very weak.

Alaska has gone to great lengths to distinguish the two candidates on the ballot – including by adding their middle initials and the full name Daniel J Sullivan, as opposed to Dan S Sullivan, the GOP incumbent.

Finally, they explicitly list Dan S Sullivan as ‘incumbent’ – making clear who is who. 

Trump has insisted voters still need a ‘190 IQ’ to get the ballot right as most people ‘don’t know what incumbent means.’

Regarding possible criminal charges, Muller stressed the many unknowns – and that ‘further investigation is essential’ to determine whether the charges should be brought by federal prosecutors.

‘I do wonder if there were campaign finance violations committed here,’ Muller said in a post on the Election Law Blog.

‘We’ll have to wait and see how contributions were structured, and whether some where appropriately made but simply difficult to find in the disclosure data, or whether some were in violation of law.’

As far as possible charges of conspiracy to violate the National Voting Rights Act, Muller theorized on where the line might be drawn between ‘ordinary politics’ and ‘dirty tricks’ – and when that ‘crosses into behavior that is designed to prevent voters from exercising a choice.’

‘I think the voters have been appropriately informed, and there is little likelihood of actual confusion,’ Muller said. ‘But I think the attempts to do so this spring and summer could still be criminal.’

The DOJ argued in its amended complaint that both Peltola’s campaign and the DSCC misled the court last week, when claiming they lacked the ‘knowledge or information’ to speak to the decoy candidate’s intentions to run for office.

The Justice Department’s filing ticks through the New York Times report before saying it provides the opposite: That they ‘orchestrated the sham campaign’ for purposes of ‘misleading Alaskan voters.’

It is unclear whether this will alter the strength of the case.

Peltola’s campaign and the DSCC, meanwhile, vehemently disputed the allegations in a filing of their own, saying Friday that the accusations were ‘nonsense’ and a thinly veiled attempt to delay certification of the vote.

‘The only one who could possibly know Daniel J Sullivan’s true reasons for filing as a candidate is Daniel J Sullivan,’ they told the court.

The turmoil around the political trickery has led to unprecedented attention on the Last Frontier’s Senate race.