WHY THE TRUMP REGIME'S ALASKA INTERVENTION MAKES ME ANGRY (BESIDES THE OBVIOUS REASONS)

This isn't the most important story in the world right now, though it could be hugely significant after Election Day.

For months, President Trump has mounted a sustained effort to attack the integrity of U.S. elections while using the federal government to try to assert more control over the voting process overseen by states.

Last week, Mr. Trump opened a new front.

Rather than simply push false claims at his rallies or target voters his administration claims should not be on the rolls, Mr. Trump moved to pre-emptively challenge the certification of Alaska’s Senate election if the Republican candidate narrowly loses.

... the Justice Department ... asked a federal court to block the certification of the election if the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan, were to lose by a slim margin. The administration argued the presence of another candidate with a nearly identical name on the ballot has skewed the election toward Democrats.

But the Constitution says that elections are supposed to be run by the states, and the state of Alaska has addressed this issue, as Steve Vladeck notes:

For starters, the “voter confusion” issue has already been litigated in Alaska’s state courts. In June, the state disqualified Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired Petersburg teacher, on the ground that he filed to run for the Senate “with a purpose to confuse or mislead.” But a superior court judge reinstated him, holding that the state’s decision rested on a “previously unstated, ‘good faith’ criteria” found nowhere in Alaska law, and that the state had other tools to address confusion. On June 29, three hours after oral argument, the Alaska Supreme Court affirmed.

Let me just stop here and point out that there was a similar situation in the Massachusetts gubernatorial election of 1978. The Democratic nominee was a conservative known as Ed King -- he'd beaten Michael Dukakis in the primary. (Dukakis won his old job back four years later and was perceived as a successful governor when he ran for president in 1988, but he'd fallen into disfavor in '78.) Ed King was Edward J. King -- but there was another conservative candidate, named Edward F. King, who lost the Republican primary and then made his way onto the November ballot as an independent.

I was in college in New York in 1978, but I still voted back in Boston. I remember my mother getting postcards from the Edward J. King campaign that showed his middle initial in large, bold type and made clear which King was which. If you're in this situation, that's what you need to do -- find ways of clearing up the confusion for the voters. (Can't Elon Musk just pour a few millions or billions into that effort on Sullivan's behalf?)

Edward J. King, the Democrat, won the general election, beating Republican Frank Hatch by more than 100,000 votes. I can't find the other King's vote total -- the website of the Massachusetts secretary doesn't even report it -- but there were fewer than 6,000 votes for "all others."

Massachusetts voters in 1978 probably found it slightly easier to distinguish the two Kings -- ballots listed each party's candidates vertically under the party's name. They would have found Edward J. King under the Democratic header.

Alaska ballots don't look like that -- but the state has made it very clear which one is the incumbent Republican senator, by designating him on the ballot as both a "Republican" and an "Incumbent."

It's his job to tell people: Vote for me, the guy with "Incumbent" after his name.

Are Alaska voters capable of learning a new thing in a Senate election? They were in 2010. Remember, that's the year when a Tea Party extremist named Joe Miller beat incumbent Lisa Murkowski in the Republican primary. Alaska now has all-party "jungle" primaries and sends the top four vote-getters to the general election, but in 2010, Alaska had a traditional voting system. Once Murkowski lost her party's primary, she couldn't appear on the general election ballot, not even as an independent, the way Edward F. King ran in Massachusetts in 1978.

So she ran as a write-in -- which meant she had to teach voters how to spell her name. As it turned out, the state accepted ballots that misspelled her name but matched it phonetically. It didn't matter. She beat Miller by more than 10,000 votes. Miller challenged the accepted ballots that had slight misspellings of her name, but, as the Anchorage Daily News reported at the time,

Even subtracting all the votes counted for Murkowski but challenged by the Miller campaign, Murkowski would still be ahead by 2,247 votes. That margin appears to make Miller's lawsuit asking the courts to toss out misspelled votes irrelevant. There aren't enough misspelled votes identified for Miller to win.

So Alaska voters are capable of learning. That means they're capable of learning which Dan Sullivan is which.

And as Steve Vladeck notes,

Alaska has ranked-choice voting—meaning someone who is confused can rank the two Sullivans first and second, which, barring some incredibly unlikely scenario, means a vote for the imposter Sullivan will effectively end up as a vote for the incumbent Sullivan.

Right. And we also know that the two Sullivans were on the ballot in the primary -- Alaska has all-party "jungle" primaries now -- and all evidence suggests that the presence of the non-incumbent was not the reason Peltola finished first:

... when this same issue arose in the primary, not only did the imposter receive far fewer votes than the margin separating Sullivan from former Rep. Mary Peltola, but it at least appears that many of the votes the other Sullivan did receive came from heavily Democratic precincts.

Here's how the top three candidates finished:

All of this is moot if Mary Peltola wins more than 50% of the vote in the general election -- though it wouldn't surprise me if the Justice Department sues anyway. A flat-out Peltola majority would mean, to a rational person, that a majority of Alaska voters wanted her to beat the incumbent and nothing else in the electoral process matters. But it wouldn't surprise me if the Justice Department refuses to drop the suit, claiming that an unquantifiable miasma of confusion led to the result, even though Alaska voters have demonstrated that they know how to read and process basic information.

The administration wants newly elected Democrats to come in under a cloud of suspicion. That's why this lawsuit wasn't filed before the Alaska general election ballot was finalized. Republicans know they're going to suffer some serious losses. They want their base to perceive all of those losses as fake.