Alaskans are being told they can’t read their own ballots.

That’s the premise of the lawsuit the Justice Department filed this week, at President Donald Trump’s direction, to block certification of our U.S. Senate race. Early voting has barely started, and Washington has already decided how to explain away a result it doesn’t like.

Read the lawsuit’s terms. It applies only if Sen. Dan Sullivan loses and would have won had votes for the other Dan Sullivan on the ballot (retired Petersburg teacher) gone to him. If the incumbent wins, nobody was confused. If he loses, we were all fooled. Our intelligence apparently depends on who comes out ahead.

This insults a state where people read tide tables, Bush airstrip conditions and fishing regulations thicker than any federal manual. We can handle a ballot that labels the senator as the incumbent.

We can handle ranked-choice voting, which lets anyone worried about confusion rank both Sullivans and still count for the senator.

And we can handle a candidate that our own supreme court ordered onto the ballot, under our own laws, in a decision that Trump’s Washington now wants to overrule by the back door.

What matters most is the message. Alaskans are told that our votes count only if they produce the right winner, and that if they don’t, it’s because we were too foolish to know what we were doing.

We aren’t. We know who is on the ballot, and we know when we are being played.

Count every vote and certify the result, whoever wins.

Paul Southland