The usual terms. Five claims you likely saw this week, what happened when each was checked, and what was true underneath. Three came from the government, one from a Democratic campaign, and one from a governing party abroad. The pattern is at the end, and this week it is a clock.
1. “The suit is not saying, ‘don’t certify.’”
The claim. Attorney General Todd Blanche, on Face the Nation last Sunday, describing the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alaska. He had posted the day before that the suit “does not seek to stop” certification. The complaint asks a federal court to withhold certification of the Senate result if Mary Peltola wins while the second Dan Sullivan remains on the ballot. The attorney general’s framing was that this was a research exercise, “the Department of Justice doing our own research under the law.”
What happened when it was checked. The department checked it for us, in its own filings. On Tuesday it told Judge Sharon Gleason that a narrow Peltola win would be “a tainted victory for Peltola.” On Thursday it replaced the complaint with a new one adding a Supremacy Clause claim, and argued the three motions to dismiss should be denied because they attacked a document that no longer existed. On Friday it asked the judge to order the state to pull every ballot marked for the second Sullivan and hold it “until it can be determined whether voters were fooled.” The State of Alaska answered Saturday that the request was “both disturbing and impossible,” and asked for dismissal “with prejudice.”
What was true underneath. The suit was always about certification; the attorney general’s Sunday sentence described a complaint that didn’t exist. By Friday the department wasn’t content to hold the certificate. It wanted the ballots. The distance between “not saying don’t certify” and “impound the votes for one candidate” is five days, and both ends of it are in the same docket.