Trump Wants the “Fake Dan Sullivan” Votes Handed to the Real One. Alaska Law Has No Way to Do That.

Peltola leads by 637 first-choice votes with tens of thousands uncounted. The second Sullivan has 3,600. The president's solution is to hand them over. The law's solution is the one it already has.

The post went up Thursday afternoon. The vote totals for “the Fake Dan Sullivan,” the president wrote, plus those of “the other ‘slug’ that the Dems put on the Ballot,” should be “immediately given to the REAL Dan Sullivan, and the Election is over.” Then: “He easily wins. There is no other fair solution!” The “slug” is Gerald Heikes, a Palmer minister and drywall contractor who has run for most offices in Alaska and reached this ballot after a Democrat withdrew. The “Fake Dan Sullivan” is Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., the retired teacher the Alaska Supreme Court kept on the ballot in June, the Justice Department sued over in October, and Judge Sharon Gleason declined to let the department pull ballots for on Sunday, because the government “provides no workable plan” to do it.

Here are the numbers the post is about, as of Thursday, per Newsweek’s tally. Mary Peltola, 102,962, 48.2 percent. Senator Dan Sullivan, 102,325, 47.9 percent. Heikes, 4,846. Sullivan Jr., 3,600. Peltola’s lead is 637 votes, with tens of thousands of absentee and early ballots still to be counted; the division updates on November 10 and 13, tabulates ranked choices on November 18, and certifies on November 25. Nobody has a majority, which is the one condition under which Alaska’s system does anything at all.

And what it does is the thing the president is demanding, with one difference that is the entire point. On November 18 the last-place candidate is eliminated, and every ballot that ranked him first moves to that voter’s next choice. If Sullivan Jr. is last, his 3,600 ballots go wherever 3,600 Alaskans said they should go: to the senator, if a voter marked the senator second; to Peltola, if she was second; nowhere, if the voter ranked nobody else. Then Heikes, if he’s third, and the same. The system reads the ballots. The president’s solution skips the reading and assigns the ballots to the candidate he prefers, on the theory that everyone who voted for a man named Sullivan meant the other one, including the Alaskans who did it on purpose, which is a population the Times documented and the president’s own party has recruited before.

There is no legal path to it. Jeff Feldman, who teaches law at the University of Washington and has practiced in Alaska for decades, told Newsweek that “Alaska law is crystal clear on the proper procedure for tabulating votes,” and that no provision lets anyone reassign a ballot from one candidate to another. Gleason said as much on Sunday from the other direction: the department could not even have the ballots set aside, let alone recounted for someone else, without breaking the secrecy of the ballot. The appeal of that ruling is pending at the Ninth Circuit, which has already written what it thinks of eve-of-election emergencies the government builds for itself. There is also a state investigation the governor ordered, a federal grand jury in Anchorage, and target letters to twenty Democrats, none of which touches a single ballot.

What is new is the author. For three weeks the demand to hold Alaska’s result came from the Justice Department, which at least filed it in a court and lost. On Thursday it came from the president, in his own name, with the word “immediately” and the phrase “the Election is over,” while the count was still running. This publication spent October on a single question, what the loser does on election night, and gave the president credit on Wednesday morning for saying “Yes, sure I’ll accept them.” Thursday’s post is the first thing he has said that walks that back. He accepted the results in general. He has now told Alaska what its result should be, before it has one.

The honest reading is that Peltola may lose. Her lead is 637 votes, the remaining ballots lean the way late Alaska ballots usually lean, and the ranked tabulation will move some of Heikes’ and Sullivan Jr.’s voters to the senator because some of them meant him. If that happens, the system will have done what the president asked, by counting. If it doesn’t, the system will have done what the president asked, by counting. The difference between those two outcomes and the post is that the post does not want to wait for the count, and neither, apparently, did the lawsuit, the ballot-impound request, the grand jury or the letters. Alaska has a mechanism for every one of the president’s worries. It runs on the 18th. He has asked for the only thing it doesn’t allow, which is to skip it.