Everything wrong with the DOJ’s uniquely embarrassing lawsuit against Alaska: There are so many things wrong with the lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice to block certification of the Alaska U.S. Senate election that it’s hardly worth listing them all.
For one thing, the issue should have been — and indeed was — litigated and decided months ago. To recall, the issue was whether a second Dan Sullivan was entitled to be on the ballot as a candidate competing against incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan.
The two Dan Sullivans have different middle initials. The incumbent’s is S, and the challenger’s is J (and he’s also a Jr.). On the Alaska ballot, the word “Incumbent” appears next to “Dan S. Sullivan,” as does the label “(Registered Republican).” Nothing appears next to “Dan J. Sullivan, Jr.” Still, the incumbent’s supporters are concerned that some voters might mistakenly vote for Dan Sullivan the challenger, and perhaps even enough of them to cause the incumbent to mistakenly lose the election.
Even more important, regardless of timing, there is no law that gives Trump’s Department of Justice authority to sue over this issue.
But this concern is significantly mitigated by the fact that Alaska uses instant runoff voting (a version of ranked choice voting), which permits voters to rank candidates in order of preference and, when tabulating the results, eliminates the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes and transfers the ballots that ranked the eliminated candidate first to whichever other candidate is ranked next on the ballot. The tabulation process repeats this elimination-and-transfer process until there is a winner with a majority of votes.
Consequently, voters who mistakenly rank Dan J. Sullivan Jr. first and Sen. Dan Sullivan second will have their ballots transferred to the incumbent after the other one is eliminated in the instant runoff process. Only if more voters rank the challenger ahead of the incumbent, or if they don’t bother to rank both Dan Sullivans — two extremely unlikely scenarios — will there be a risk of… https://www.ms.now/opinion/trump-doj-lawsuit-alaska-senate-election-certification