The effort by the United States Department of Justice to preemptively block the certification of the election results for the Senate race in the state of Alaska is not aimed at giving the U.S. president, Donald Trump, control over state elections, attorney general Todd Blanche said on Sunday.
The agency led by Blanche filed a lawsuit on Friday to prevent Alaska from certifying the outcome of the U.S. Senate race if the Republican incumbent is defeated by a narrow margin. But according to Blanche, the Department of Justice is not laying the groundwork to overturn an election result unfavorable to Trump.
“The president Trump is not trying to take control of a state election in any way,” Blanche told CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We are not creating the grounds for the president to do this.”
Election officials across the country told Reuters that they are preparing for possible federal interference in the November 3 midterm elections, which will determine control of the U.S. Congress. Among the concerns are legal challenges and voting disputes that could delay or prevent the certification of results.
In addition to the Alaska suit, the Trump administration has taken other measures related to the U.S. electoral system, including a lawsuit to prevent California from tallying certain mail-in ballots, and a largely unsuccessful bid to compel 30 states and the District of Columbia to provide complete elector lists.
Blanche stated that the Alaska action concerns specifically that state and reiterated the Trump administration’s argument that voters could become “confused” because two Republicans on the ballot share nearly identical names: the incumbent senator Dan S. Sullivan and the challenger Dan J. Sullivan Jr. According to Blanche, the second candidate is running only “to confuse voters.”
“Never have opponents gone to such extremes to try to sabotage and defraud an election as in this case,” Blanche told CNN.
Dan J. Sullivan has denied, in interviews with the American press, that his candidacy aims to cause confusion or divert votes from Dan S. Sullivan. His campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Blanche said the lawsuit was filed to give authorities “the ability to determine whether there was confusion that violates the law.”
He declined to comment on whether Trump ordered him to bring the case, though the president himself has said that he did. Trump returned to comment on the Alaska case this Sunday, accusing Democrats of orchestrating Dan J. Sullivan’s candidacy.
“They have made everything very confusing and I think that’s very unfair,” Trump told reporters before boarding a plane to Michigan. “I think it’s illegal because it is unfair. You want justice in elections.”
Critics of the move, including Democratic election officials and some Republicans, view the move as part of a pattern of excessive federal intervention in election oversight.
“The fact that Todd Blanche and the Department of Justice are willing to back this and put their names on it is an indication of how far they will go after this election ends to try to contest the results,” California Democratic Senator Adam Schiff told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
