President Donald Trump said he told his administration to file its lawsuit to block certification of the U.S. Senate race in Alaska if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, kicking off what many fear could become a lengthy battle between the government and states over certifying an election where the president’s party is struggling.

“I’m the one that said do it,” Trump told reporters as he landed for a campaign rally in Florida on Friday, Oct. 23.

The lawsuit, filed late Thursday, centers on one of the president’s longstanding complaints in the Senate race in Alaska — the presence of a second candidate named Dan Sullivan, who Republicans fear could siphon away votes from the incumbent in what’s likely to be a tight contest with Democrat Mary Peltola, the state’s former congresswoman.

The second Sullivan, who is Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired Petersburg teacher, has said he decided to run on his own, but Republicans contend he is a Democratic plant.

The lawsuit by the Republican president’s Department of Justice in federal court in Alaska demands that the state be blocked from certifying a Peltola win if Daniel J. Sullivan remains on the ballot.

“The United States accordingly brings this lawsuit to protect the integrity of the 2026 Senate election in Alaska,” the lawsuit says, contending that federal law requires states to protect the integrity of federal elections.

The legal challenge came 11 days before the Nov. 3 election and months after the final ballot was set.

Peltola and national Democrats filed a legal motion Friday to stop the Trump administration from blocking the results of the election if Sen. Sullivan loses.

“Alaskans, apparently, must elect Senator Dan S. Sullivan or the president will not let them elect anyone at all,” says the motion, filed by the Alaskans for Mary campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

The Alaska Supreme Court rejected a previous Republican effort to remove Daniel J. Sullivan from the ballot, and the state’s elections officials, also Republicans, made the decisions about how to list him on the ballot. He will appear without a party designation next to his name, even though he filed as a Republican, while the senator will be listed as a Republican, with the added designation of “incumbent” next to his name.

The senator received more than 68,000 votes in the August primary, 41.4%, while the challenger Sullivan got 4,107, about 2% of the total vote. Peltola, who had previously served one full term in the House 2023-2025, was the top vote-getter at 49.5% in the nonpartisan primary.

Both parties expect that whoever wins in November will do so by a tight margin.

The campaign for Sen. Dan Sullivan did not address whether the senator supports the Department of Justice’s intervention. “We’ll let the DOJ complaint run its course,” campaign spokesman Nate Adams said in a text message.

Alaska’s other senator, Republican Lisa Murkowski, condemned the move in a statement Friday afternoon.

“Alaskans don’t need any help voting for their preferred candidates, and the State of Alaska has already handled this by clearly distinguishing the candidates on this year’s ballot. The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit,” Murkowski said, as reported by the Anchorage Daily News.

The Petersburg Sullivan said in a text message to the Daily News on Friday that he had “no comment for now.”

National Democrats were not quiet.

“Donald Trump knows that Dan Sullivan is going to lose the election, so now his Department of Justice is filing a sham lawsuit to overturn the will of Alaska voters and steal an election when he loses,” said Devan Barber, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

The Department of Justice has increasingly been used to bolster the president’s political operation, targeting his enemies and suing Democratic-controlled states before the election. Democrats and many voting rights advocates have long feared that the administration will try to block certification of elections that Trump’s party loses, much as he unsuccessfully tried to do when he lost the White House race to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.

The lawsuit was signed by Associate U.S. Attorney General Stanley Woodward, who represented Trump allies and defendants charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot before becoming one of the top appointees at the department.

Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, said the lawsuit would likely only kick in if Republicans narrowly lost the Alaska Senate race and that it probably would not survive long.

“The statute simply doesn’t let the Department of Justice enjoin certification,” Muller said. “The lawsuit could well be mooted by a wide Democratic victory or a narrow Republican one, and if not, the court will likely dismiss it next month.”

The U.S. Constitution grants states the power to run their own elections. Elections for federal office like the Senate must comply with standards set by Congress. That division of power has frustrated Trump, who repeatedly has tried to seize control of election procedures through executive orders that courts have blocked.

The final step for a state election is formally certifying the winner, the act that the administration’s lawsuit seeks to prevent, it requests, “pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for. Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan.”

Trump has complained about Daniel J. Sullivan’s presence on the ballot, making reference to it during a rally in Alaska this month and in repeated social media posts, including one this week where he called it “CHEATING.”

Clogging a ballot with third party candidates to siphon off votes from the other major party is a long-standing tactic in the country’s two-party system.