Trump’s Alaska Senate victory claim ignores ranked-choice rules

On 7 November, Trump declared on Truth Social that the Alaska Senate race was “OVER” and said the Republican senator had won “BY A LOT”. He reached that conclusion by adding 3,600 votes for Daniel J. Sullivan Jr and 4,846 for Gerald Heikes to the incumbent’s tally.

Those figures match a snapshot of the state’s unofficial first-preference results, published by election-results site GovGalaxy from a file updated on 4 November. In that count, Democrat Mary Peltola led Senator Sullivan by 637 votes, with 102,962 to his 102,325. USA Today reported on 7 November that roughly three-quarters of the estimated vote had been counted.

Alaska uses ranked-choice voting. If no candidate wins a majority, the last-placed candidate is eliminated and their ballots go to the next-ranked candidate still in the race, or become inactive if there is no remaining choice. The smaller candidates’ votes do not automatically belong to the senator.

An incomplete state ballot file shows the difference. In a simulated count, voting-reform group FairVote found that, of 3,330 ballots ranking Daniel J. Sullivan Jr first, 1,123 would end up with Peltola, 778 with the senator and 1,429 with neither. Alaska News, using the same file, found about 44% of Heikes’s first-choice ballots would end up with the senator, 16% with Peltola and 40% with neither.

Alaska News estimated that applying the available preferences to the broader preliminary count could put the senator about 330 votes ahead. But that assumes missing ballots follow the same pattern, and many more votes remain uncounted. If no candidate wins a first-choice majority, the state plans to conduct the ranked-choice count on 18 November.

Allegations about the candidates

Trump also repeated the false claim that Daniel J. Sullivan Jr, a retired teacher from Petersburg, had never voted. The Anchorage Press reported in September, after Trump made the same claim, that the candidate’s voting record showed he had voted more than 30 times since 2000. The state elections division told local radio station KFSK he voted by post in the August primary.

Alaska’s elections director, Carol Beecher, had tried to exclude the namesake, citing, among other things, his request to appear on the ballot as “Dan Sullivan” and concerns about confusion. A state court overturned her decision, finding no legal basis for it and insufficient evidence for her conclusion; Alaska’s Supreme Court upheld the order. The ballot distinguished the two candidates by their middle initials and identified the senator as the incumbent. The rulings did not decide the later recruitment allegations.

The Justice Department had asked a federal court to block certification