Alaska Isn’t the Target. Alaska Is the Practice Swing.
The DOJ just filed a lawsuit to cancel an election it hasn’t lost yet. Everyone’s watching the wrong part of it.
The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,070: Thursday, October 29th, 2026.
Let me tell you what happened Thursday, because the headlines are going to bury it under rally noise.
The Department of Justice sued the State of Alaska.
Not after the election. Before it. Five days before it.
The complaint says there’s a second “Dan Sullivan” on the Senate ballot, a man named Daniel J. Sullivan who switched his party registration to Republican shortly before filing, asked to appear as “Dan Sullivan,” and built a campaign website that looks a lot like the senator’s.
The DOJ says this could confuse voters and cost the incumbent, Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, votes that would otherwise be his.
Fine. That part is true…and…you should know that. Alaska’s own elections director said the guy filed to confuse people. Nobody serious disputes it.
Now here’s the part you need to read…and think on deeply.
The lawsuit asks a federal court to block certification of the result if Sullivan loses, pending an “investigation” into whether enough votes for the fake Sullivan were really meant for the real one.
Now…take that all in.
The federal government is asking for the power to decide, after the votes are counted, what voters meant. And…then to use that guess to override what they actually did.
That is not a lawsuit about a confusing ballot.
That is a lawsuit about who gets to decide whether an election counts.
Everyone Is Looking At The Wrong Thing
The obvious take is “Trump won’t accept results.”
You’ll see it a thousand times by Friday. Mark Kelly said this week that Democrats are worried about exactly that. Speaker Johnson called it a nonsense narrative.
The obvious take is correct. It is also useless, because it stops one step short of the interesting question:
Why Alaska?
Alaska has three electoral votes and a Senate seat Republicans have held for a decade. If you were going to stage a fight over election certification, you would not pick the one state most Americans couldn’t find without a map.
Unless you weren’t trying to win the fight. You were trying to file it.
Here’s The Tell
The fake Sullivan has been on the ballot for months.
Alaska’s elections director tried to pull him. A trial court put him back. The Alaska Supreme Court said the trial court got it right.
The DOJ sat on its hands through every step of that.
Then the polls tightened. Then the President flew to Alaska and called the ballot “cheating.” Then he called for Mary Peltola to quit the race and face prosecution.
And then, five days out…the lawsuit landed.
That’s not a reaction to a confusing ballot. That’s an insurance policy you buy when you realize you might lose.
What The Lawsuit Actually Builds
Strip the names off it and look at the legal machinery.
Claim one:
Ballot-name confusion is no longer a state matter. The federal government can step in and decide if a state’s ballot was fair enough to count. Alaska already ran this through its own courts, top to bottom. The DOJ is saying that doesn’t settle it.
Claim two:
Voter intent can be reconstructed after the fact. An investigator can look at a pile of ballots and declare that these people meant the other guy.
Claim three:
Certification can be frozen on the possibility that the reconstruction might flip the result.
Now imagine those three claims, in a federal court order, ready to cite. Not in Alaska. In Arizona. In Georgia. In Pennsylvania. In 2028.
Every one of those states has ballots with names that look alike, third-party spoilers, minor-party candidates who “siphon” votes. Every single one. That…is what a ballot is.
If this theory gets a foothold in Anchorage, there is no race in America it can’t be aimed at.
The Ranked-Choice Angle Nobody’s Talking About
One more layer.
Alaska uses ranked-choice voting. So does Maine. So does New York City. So do dozens of cities and counties. The Republican Party has spent years trying to kill it at the state level and has mostly failed.
The DOJ’s theory only works because of ranked-choice. The argument is that the spoiler scrambled the ranking. So the fix, naturally, is to let someone un-scramble it.
That’s a Trojan horse. You don’t have to repeal ranked-choice if you can get a court to say its results are too confusing to certify.
Say The Quiet Part
They may lose this case. They may expect to lose it.
That isn’t a flaw. That’s the plan. You file a theory, you get it refined on appeal…you get the dissents and the footnotes and the language you’ll quote next time. By the time it matters, it’s not a crazy new idea. It’s “established litigation.”
The same week this suit dropped, the President stood on a stage in Texas and said, again, that he’s won three presidential elections.
He’s told you what he believes. The lawsuit is him telling you…what he plans to do about it.
What You Can Do
Watch the ruling, not the rally. The judge’s reasoning matters more than the result.
Watch who signs the brief. The names on a DOJ filing are the names you’ll see again.
And…watch for the phrase “pending investigation.” That’s the fuse.
Alaska isn’t the target.
Alaska…is the practice swing.
#HoldFast
Back soon.
-Jack
Jack Hopkins
P.S. The fake Sullivan is real. The confusion is real. Concede both. Then ask the only question that matters: Alaska’s courts already fixed this. Why does Washington need to fix it again, and why only if they lose?
P.P.S. Forward this to one person who thinks “it’s just Alaska.” It was just Alaska in the same way the first lawsuit in 2020 was just “one” county.
As an Alaskan Independent voter (and Peltola supporter) I can say, this frivolous, bullshit lawsuit has been fast tracked in court already, and I believe the Federal Judge Sharon Gleason is going to dismiss this bullshit with prejudice for being Bullshit!, and it won't matter either way after the vote is tallied...
Any way we slice it... The Peltola campaign has disgraced us. They RECRUITED everybody they could find with the matching name.... ONE guy said he'd do it. It's cheating. Call a spade a spade no matter who dealt it.