A judge says Alaska can't keep the second Dan Sullivan off the Senate ballot

Alaska's Republican U.S. Senate primary is going to have two Dan Sullivans on the ballot — now by order of a judge.

An Anchorage Superior Court judge ruled Friday that state election officials have to put Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a Petersburg resident, on the Aug. 18 Republican primary ballot, alongside the man whose name he nearly shares: incumbent U.S. Sen. Daniel S. Sullivan. The Division of Elections had tried to keep the Petersburg Sullivan off, concluding his candidacy wasn't genuine and was meant to confuse voters. The judge said the state had no legal basis to do that.

The problem, Judge Thomas Matthews found, is that the "good-faith candidacy" test the Division used to reject Sullivan exists nowhere — not in the U.S. Constitution, not in Alaska's election laws, not in the Division's own regulations. "The concept of 'good-faith,' or pure motive, or bona fide intent is simply absent," he wrote. The Constitution sets just three qualifications to run for U.S. Senate — at least 30 years old, a U.S. citizen, and a resident of the state — and the Division never disputed that Sullivan meets all three.

Matthews didn't dismiss the worry about voter confusion. He just said the fix isn't throwing a qualified candidate off the ballot. The state has other tools, he noted, including how the names are printed; the Division itself had floated listing the challenger as "Sullivan, Dan J." and the senator as "Sullivan, Dan." "But those tools are different from the complete exclusion of a candidate," the judge wrote.

The fight had a partisan backdrop. Sullivan filed before the June 1 deadline and was initially certified — until the Alaska Republican Party complained and the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent a letter, prompting the Division to reverse course. Matthews also leaned on a recent Alaska Supreme Court ruling holding that when election law is unclear, the presumption runs in favor of letting candidates on the ballot.

The upshot: unless the state appeals and gets the order overturned, both Dan Sullivans will appear on the Republican Senate primary ballot. Whether voters can tell them apart is, as the judge pointed out, a different question.