Alaska Judge Says No to Peltola’s Demand for the Names of Voters Whose Ballots Were Tossed

Mary Peltola’s campaign went to court for a list of every Alaskan whose absentee ballot got rejected, with the reason next to each name. On Wednesday, the judge said no.

Anchorage Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews ruled the request was “not reasonable,” especially with election workers still in the middle of counting ballots from last week’s election, the Associated Press reported. It is a clean win for the state Division of Elections, which argued that handing over the list would trample voters’ privacy, and for Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, whose campaign joined the case to fight it.

The ruling came on the same day Peltola told her followers the race was already hers.

The race has not been called. Alaska is the only U.S. Senate contest in the country still too early to call, and the count is a long way from finished.

A list nobody else gets to see

Here is what Peltola’s lawyers wanted. When an absentee ballot comes in, election workers give it a preliminary code. One letter means it looks good. Another means it is likely headed for the reject pile, for problems like a missing witness signature or a late postmark. The campaign asked the state for those codes along with the names of the voters attached to them.

The state said those daily lists are not public records at all. In a court filing, its lawyers called them “ephemeral working documents that are not meant for preservation.” The lists are confidential and get thrown out after each session, according to Alaska News. No ballot is officially accepted or rejected until the State Review Board finishes its work and the election is certified.

Michaela Thompson, who runs the absentee review boards for the Division of Elections, said in a sworn statement that even the stripped-down version campaign observers see includes home addresses, which many voters work hard to keep private. Observers from both campaigns sign confidentiality agreements and are not allowed to keep, copy or record anything in those reports.

“Lightning speed”

The case moved fast. Peltola’s campaign sued Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom and elections director Carol Beecher last week. Matthews let Sullivan’s campaign join the fight at the start of Tuesday’s hearing, said the case was moving at “lightning speed,” and promised a written decision by Wednesday afternoon, the Anchorage Daily News reported.

“This motion is not about who won or lost the election,” Matthews said Tuesday. “This motion is about access to public records.”

Abha Khanna, a lawyer with the Elias Law Group who argued for the Peltola campaign, told the court the campaign had no complaints about how Alaska was counting.

“We have no indications that there has been any irregularity in the counting process, anything that’s worth concern,” Khanna said. “As far as we can tell, the absentee ballot review process is going incredibly smoothly and we plan to keep it that way.”

That is a strange thing to say while suing the people doing the counting. If the review is going smoothly and observers are already in the room, it is fair to ask what the names were for.

The campaign tried to shrink the ask as the hearing went on. It said it only wanted voters’ names and their accept or reject codes, not addresses, and promised it “will not contact a single voter” without first going through the Division of Elections. Matthews said at the end of the hearing that the request looked “a bit narrower” than he expected walking in. It still was not enough.

The state’s case for waiting

Margaret Paton-Walsh, the lawyer for the state, made a simple point. Stripping addresses and other personal details from those lists would be “labor intensive” for an elections office that is still counting. She also asked why a campaign should see this information before the voters themselves do.

Under Alaska law, a voter whose absentee ballot is rejected gets a notice in the mail within 60 days after the election is certified. Peltola’s team wanted names now, weeks before certification, while ballots were still being reviewed.

Certification, Paton-Walsh said, is “the starting point not the ending point” for most legal fights over elections. The law gives a campaign a path once results are final, not a real-time list of voters while the referees are still on the field.

Alaska also does not have a ballot curing process, meaning voters cannot go back and fix a mistake like a missing signature after the fact. In 2024, the state rejected about 1,300 absentee ballots, many of them for improper or insufficient witnessing, according to the Daily News. With no legal way to fix a rejected ballot, it is not obvious what a list of names would have let the campaign do, other than make phone calls and build a story.

Where the count goes from here

Peltola led Sullivan by 2,517 first-choice votes as of Tuesday. In a ranked-choice state, that can still move.

Alaska keeps accepting ballots from overseas voters, including troops, for 15 days after Election Day, which makes Nov. 18 the last day those can arrive. That is also the date the Division of Elections is aiming to run its ranked-choice tabulation if no one clears 50 percent of first-choice votes. The absentee review boards are set to finish by the same date. Certification is scheduled for Nov. 25.

Hanging over all of it is the second Dan Sullivan. A Republican named Daniel J. Sullivan showed up on the ballot next to the senator, and Trump and other Republicans say Peltola’s side worked with him to siphon votes from the real one. Days before the election, The New York Times reported that Peltola’s political operation had been in touch with him, though Peltola has strongly denied any direct involvement in his campaign, according to The Washington Sun.

Trump has been clear about where he stands. “All votes going to the Fake Dan Sullivan, which was done solely for the purpose of fraud and confusion, should immediately be given to the Real Dan Sullivan (Senator!),” he wrote on Truth Social Tuesday.

For now, the rules held. Alaska’s election workers get to finish their job without a campaign looking over their shoulder at a list of names, and voters keep the privacy the state promised them. Peltola can call herself the next senator on 𝕏 all she wants. The ballots, and the people counting them, still have the final word.