Alaska voters looking at their Senate ballot this fall will find two Sullivans on it. One is Dan S. Sullivan, the Republican incumbent seeking a third term. The other is Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a 70-year-old retired teacher from Petersburg who is no relation, isn’t really campaigning, and got 2.5 percent in the August primary. The Justice Department has now sued to block certification of the race if the incumbent loses — a suit the president says he personally ordered. The interesting question isn’t whether voters might get confused. It’s the one an Alaska judge answered back in June: can the state remove a man from the ballot for that?

The state’s election director tried. In June, Director Carol Beecher removed Daniel J. Sullivan from the ballot, finding his filing wasn’t made in good faith. He’d asked to appear as “Dan Sullivan,” a name he isn’t registered under. He’d initially asked for “Dan S. Sullivan” — the senator’s own middle initial. He’d switched his registration to Republican two days before filing, having never been registered Republican before. He had a look-alike website and a consultant with Democratic ties. The director concluded the filing was made “with a purpose to confuse or mislead,” and under Alaska’s regulation against names presented in a confusing or misleading manner, she struck him.

A superior court judge put him back, and his reasoning is the story. “Despite the Division’s assertion that Mr. Sullivan may be excluded from the ballot because he lacks ‘good-faith,'” Judge Thomas Matthews wrote, “there is no statute which provides such a criterion. The concept of ‘good-faith,’ or pure motive, or bona fide intent is simply absent.” It isn’t in the Constitution’s list of qualifications for a senator — thirty years old, nine years a citizen, a resident of the state — and under a 1995 Supreme Court ruling, states can’t add qualifications to that list. It isn’t in Alaska’s statutes. It isn’t even in the election division’s own regulations. Election officials, the judge said, don’t get to invent a motive test and disqualify a man who meets every qualification the law actually contains. He also found the evidence of bad intent thin — the division had taken the complaint against Sullivan at face value while discounting Sullivan’s own account. And on confusion itself: the state’s authority over “fairness, simplicity and clarity” on the ballot is authority over how a name is formatted — middle initials, designations — not a power to remove a qualified candidate. The Alaska Supreme Court affirmed within days, asking at argument why the state had reached for “the most extreme possible remedy.”

It’s worth pausing on that, because the alternative is worse than the problem. If an election director can remove a candidate for impure motives, then every incumbent in America has a new weapon, and the person holding it decides which motives are pure. Washington State actually has a law against deceptive same-name filings — it’s a felony there, and in 2024 three men named Bob Ferguson filed for governor and withdrew within days once the law was pointed at them. Alaska’s legislature never passed such a law. The Alaska courts’ answer, in effect, was: if you want that rule, pass it. Judges won’t write it for you.

Which brings us to the federal suit, filed October 22. The Justice Department doesn’t claim Daniel J. Sullivan should come off the ballot. It asks the court to block certification if Senator Sullivan loses — but only if a re-run of the ranked-choice tabulation, handing every Daniel J. vote to the senator, would flip the result. Its legal hook is a single clause in the National Voter Registration Act stating one of the law’s purposes is to “protect the integrity of the electoral process.” Not a duty Alaska violated — the complaint doesn’t allege one — just the purpose statement. Election-law scholars have not been kind. Notre Dame’s Derek Muller called it “one of the worst legal arguments I’ve ever seen.” Rick Hasen’s verdict: a preamble “gives no power whatsoever.” Florida State’s Michael Morley says the concern about confusion is real but the suit is the wrong vehicle — the Constitution gives disputed Senate elections to the Senate itself to judge. The suit’s factual foundation, meanwhile, is Director Beecher’s bad-faith finding — the one her own state’s courts threw out.

One more wrinkle the confusion argument has to survive: Alaska uses ranked-choice voting. A voter who marks the wrong Sullivan first can rank the right one second, which blunts the spoiler effect considerably. And the official ballot distinguishes them — “Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr.” with no party designation, against “Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican),” tagged “Incumbent,” the first time Alaska has ever used that tag.

Is the second Sullivan a plant? Nobody with authority has found that he is. He denies it, the Peltola campaign denies it, the state Democratic Party denies it, and the New York Times reported it could find no case-closing evidence either way. What exists is circumstance — a consultant, a super PAC, metadata on a press release — and circumstance is what the Alaska courts were asked to convict on in June. They declined, for a reason worth remembering the next time any official, of any party, asks for the power to tidy up a ballot: the qualifications are in the Constitution, the remedies are in the statutes, and a voter’s presumed confusion is not a legal basis for erasing a candidacy. If Alaska wants a different rule, its legislature can write one. That’s how it’s supposed to work.