WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has sharply escalated its legal intervention in state elections just days before the November 3, 2026 midterms, filing an amended lawsuit in Alaska that seeks to block certification of the Senate result if the Republican incumbent loses narrowly, and pressing a criminal investigation in California through grand jury subpoenas served on local election officials. The two moves, reported on Thursday, October 29, and Friday, October 30, 2026, together amount to an unusually direct federal challenge to how states run their own elections — a responsibility the Constitution leaves chiefly to the states — and they arrive with more than 44 million Americans already having cast ballots, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab.
The Alaska case centres on a Senate contest that could help decide control of the chamber. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take back the majority from Republicans, and Alaska is among roughly ten highly competitive Senate races this cycle. The California investigation, meanwhile, concerns alleged voting by noncitizens, which the department says it is pursuing through criminal law. In both states, officials on the receiving end of the department’s actions dispute its claims and its authority, and no court has found that fraud occurred or that any result should be overturned. The allegations remain allegations, and several of the department’s demands are still being litigated.
The timing is what makes the escalation so consequential. Election officials around the country have told Reuters they are bracing for further legal challenges from Washington as voting concludes. In Alaska, a ruling on whether the department’s lawsuit can even proceed could come as soon as Saturday, according to Reuters. In California, subpoenaed election workers have been ordered to appear in court on November 4, the day after the election. And in both states, the department’s actions have already drawn lawsuits, public rebukes from election administrators, and warnings from critics that the pressure could chill voters and election workers alike.
What the amended Alaska lawsuit asks for
In its revised lawsuit filed on Thursday, October 29, the Justice Department alleged that operatives working for Democratic candidate Mary Peltola orchestrated what it called a “sham campaign” intended to mislead voters in Alaska. The allegation follows a New York Times report published on Wednesday, October 28, which said Peltola’s aides worked with campaign lawyers and senior staff at the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm to recruit a retired teacher named Daniel J. Sullivan into the race. The retired teacher shares a name with the Republican incumbent, Senator Daniel S. Sullivan, and the department’s theory is that his presence on the ballot could siphon votes away from the incumbent.
On that basis, the department asked a federal judge to prevent certification of the Alaska Senate result if Senator Sullivan loses by a slim margin. The department has not publicly specified a precise vote threshold in the reporting of the amended filing, and the request is framed as contingent: it would apply only in the event of a narrow Republican loss. The lawsuit is pending before United States District Judge Sharon Gleason, who is also considering a motion from Peltola’s lawyers to dismiss the department’s case on the ground that the federal government lacks the legal authority to bring it. Reuters reported that a decision on that dismissal motion could come as soon as Saturday, although the timing is not certain.
The ballot itself adds a layer of complexity. Alaska uses a ranked-choice ballot, and the contest will feature Senator Sullivan, Peltola, the retired teacher Daniel J. Sullivan, and another long-shot candidate. Alaska’s ballot will indicate that Daniel S. Sullivan is the incumbent, a designation that helps distinguish him from his namesake. Earlier this year, Alaska’s elections regulator blocked Daniel J. Sullivan from appearing on the ballot, finding that his candidacy was not filed in good faith and was instead an attempt to confuse or mislead voters. State courts later restored him to the ballot, ruling that there was not enough evidence that he was trying to confuse voters and that Alaska law did not require a candidacy to be filed in good faith. That history now sits at the centre of the federal case, because the department is effectively asking a federal court to revisit, in the context of certification, a candidacy question state courts have already decided in favour of keeping him on the ballot.
Legal experts quoted in reporting on the case have expressed scepticism about the department’s position, noting that the Constitution clearly assigns the administration of elections to the states rather than to the federal government. That scepticism does not decide the case — Judge Gleason will — but it frames the uphill climb the department faces if it wants a federal court to halt certification of a state election result. The department has also escalated its investigation beyond the civil lawsuit: Reuters reported on Thursday that the department had issued more than 40 subpoenas and document-preservation requests connected to the second Dan Sullivan’s candidacy, with more expected, including subpoenas to the campaigns of both Daniel J. Sullivan and Peltola, according to a source familiar with the matter.
How Alaska officials and the campaigns responded
Alaska election officials pushed back swiftly. In a court filing on Thursday night, they called the amended lawsuit “meritless” and said it had cast a cloud over Alaska’s election that is contrary to the public interest. That language matters because it comes not from a partisan campaign but from the officials charged with running the election itself. Their position is that the department’s late intervention risks undermining confidence in a contest that voters are already deciding, rather than protecting it.
Peltola’s campaign has said it had no involvement with either Sullivan campaign, and it did not immediately respond to the amended complaint. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has denied involvement in recruiting the second Sullivan and has accused Republicans of propping up candidates of their own in other races. Daniel J. Sullivan himself has previously denied that his aim was to cause confusion or divert votes from the incumbent senator. The denials leave the department’s central factual claim — that Democratic operatives orchestrated a sham candidacy — contested on the public record, with the New York Times report as its principal published source. Reuters has said it has not independently verified that report.
Republican officials in Alaska have taken a different view. Governor Mike Dunleavy has called for a state investigation and said in an interview with NewsNation that any finding of illegality could affect whether someone is seated in the United States Senate. President Donald Trump has called for Peltola to be prosecuted, according to Reuters. Those statements illustrate the political stakes: the dispute is not only about one ballot line in one state, but about who will hold a Senate seat in a chamber where the majority may hinge on a handful of races.
Alaska-based elections attorney Scott Kendall offered a more measured assessment of the practical effect, suggesting that the second Sullivan’s presence was likely to hurt Peltola more than help her, and that with so few undecided voters remaining, the revelations were unlikely to change the outcome. That view, if borne out, would mean the fiercest fight is over the legal precedent — whether a federal court will block certification on the basis of an alleged spoiler candidacy — rather than over votes actually shifting between candidates. For background on how this dispute developed, see USN’s earlier report on the Alaska Senate race.
The Justice Department’s California subpoenas
While the Alaska fight played out in civil court, the department’s California campaign moved into criminal territory. The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s office received federal grand jury subpoenas last week as part of a Justice Department probe into alleged voting by noncitizens, according to copies of the documents seen by Reuters on Thursday. The subpoenas seek information about the agency’s methods for detecting unlawful voting by noncitizens and preventing such ballots from being counted, as well as records related to the county’s response to a series of letters the department sent this month. At least two employees of the registrar’s office were served, according to reporting that first appeared in the New York Times, with instructions to appear in court on November 4. The subpoenas were dated October 21 and 24.
The demands did not stop with Los Angeles. Reporting on Thursday and Friday said federal agents delivered another subpoena in Orange County seeking unredacted records concerning suspected noncitizen voters, and that prosecutors had also sought records from election offices in other California counties, including Santa Clara and San Diego. A letter accompanying one Los Angeles County subpoena identified Homeland Security Investigations as the agency conducting the criminal probe. It is important to be precise about what a subpoena means: prosecutors have not announced charges against the subpoenaed employees, and receiving a subpoena does not establish that a person is suspected of wrongdoing. The department has said it generally does not subpoena the targets of an investigation, and it is not clear whether the Los Angeles office itself is the focus of the inquiry.
The subpoenas are the latest step in a pressure campaign that began with letters. In recent weeks, the department sent letters to local election officials in California warning that they could face significant federal scrutiny and legal exposure if they refused to cooperate with demands to set aside ballots belonging to people federal officials had flagged as likely noncitizens. One letter warned that officials who knowingly tabulated ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens risked becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime. Election officials and their unions describe those warnings as threats. On Thursday, unions representing election workers across California sued the department, calling the threats unprecedented and unlawful and warning that they risked interfering with the lawful administration of an election already under way.
Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan responded in a statement on Thursday that the department had taken a confrontational, adversarial approach at every step, and that election officials were acting in accordance with state and federal law. A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on the subpoenas themselves but said California and the federal government agreed that noncitizen voting was properly addressed through criminal law. That narrow point of agreement — that unlawful voting, where it occurs, is a criminal matter — does not resolve the dispute over whether the department’s list of suspected noncitizens is reliable, or whether election officials should be compelled to segregate ballots on the basis of it.
A judge’s ruling, an appeal, and the 20,000-name list
The California subpoenas arrived one day after a federal judge rejected the department’s attempt to force California to segregate ballots through a court order. On Wednesday, October 28, United States District Judge David O. Carter denied the department’s request for a temporary order that would have required California to set aside and stop processing mail-in ballots from a list of about 20,000 voters the administration alleges are likely noncitizens. Judge Carter found there was no legal basis for the demand and said he was not convinced the department’s list was reliable. Reporting on the ruling said he warned that granting it would wreak havoc and disrupt the election and create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike, and that he told department lawyers to stop threatening election workers with criminal prosecution over their handling of voter records.
The department has appealed Judge Carter’s ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, arguing that continued ballot processing could undermine its request to exclude votes cast by suspected noncitizens. The department’s underlying civil lawsuit, filed on October 15, accused California of maintaining more than 20,000 likely noncitizens on its voter rolls. California disputes the reliability of that list, and the judge’s ruling sided, at least for now, with the state’s position that the department had not made a sufficient showing to justify emergency intervention in an ongoing election.
Alongside the litigation, the department has pointed to enforcement numbers. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter told reporters on Thursday that the department had charged 156 immigrants with voting or registering to vote unlawfully in a pre-midterm push, and that it had used subpoenas to state and local election officials to build such cases. Those charges are individual criminal cases, each of which must be proved in court, and they are distinct from the broader claim that California’s voter rolls contain tens of thousands of noncitizens. Critics, including Democrats and election experts, argue that the scale of the individual charges does not support the scale of the department’s demands on the state — and that the demands themselves, coming days before the election, risk sowing doubt about results regardless of what any individual case proves.
Why the timing matters days before November 3
Taken together, the Alaska and California actions illustrate a pattern that election officials say they have been watching all year: federal legal pressure arriving late, aimed at the mechanics of voting and certification rather than at individual wrongdoing alone. In Alaska, the department wants a federal judge to hold open the possibility of blocking certification after votes are cast. In California, it wants local officials to produce records and testify under criminal process while they are still counting ballots. In both cases, the department says it is acting to protect the integrity of the vote. In both cases, state officials say the intervention itself threatens the orderly administration of the election.
The distinction between those two framings is the story of this election’s final days. Supporters of the department’s approach argue that alleged irregularities must be investigated wherever they are found, even close to an election, and that courts can sort out valid claims from invalid ones. Opponents argue that late federal intervention, particularly when it targets the officials running the election rather than specific alleged violators, creates uncertainty that is itself damaging — especially when a court has already found a key government list unreliable, or when a candidacy question has already been decided by state courts. Voters, meanwhile, are already voting: more than 44 million ballots had been cast as of Thursday evening, fewer than two million short of the total from the 2022 midterms, and turnout in competitive states has been running well ahead of that cycle.
What happens next will be decided in courtrooms, not in press statements. In Alaska, Judge Gleason’s ruling on the motion to dismiss could narrow or end the certification fight before Election Day, or it could leave the department’s request alive into the vote-counting period. In California, the Ninth Circuit will weigh the department’s appeal of Judge Carter’s ruling, while the unions’ lawsuit over alleged threats against election workers proceeds separately. And on November 4, the day after the election, subpoenaed Los Angeles County employees are due in court. None of those proceedings has yet established that fraud occurred, that a spoiler candidacy was unlawfully orchestrated, or that any ballot should not count. Until a court rules otherwise, the department’s claims remain claims — forcefully made, forcefully denied, and now moving, in two states at once, toward decisions that could shape how the results of the November 3 midterms are received.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from Reuters, USA Today and Central Florida Public Media.