A judge in Alaska has ruled against the campaign of Democratic US Senate candidate Mary Peltola, rejecting its request for the immediate release of records identifying voters whose absentee ballots were rejected in this month's midterm elections. Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews said the request was "not reasonable" given the time pressure election officials face as they continue counting ballots from last week's election.
Peltola's campaign sued state election officials last Friday, three days after the ranked-choice election, seeking a list of absentee voters whose ballots had been rejected and the reasons for each rejection. The lawsuit named Lieutenant Governor Nancy Dahlstrom and Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher, after the officials refused to provide the requested records.
Judge Matthews, who heard arguments in the case on Tuesday and issued a written ruling a day later, said the Division of Elections was "currently busy processing ballots from the 2026 general election" and that the records "cannot reasonably be produced at this juncture, nor redacted of confidential information". He said the request might be considered reasonable outside the peak election period, but that it was "simply not reasonable nor required right now".
The state had argued that the information requested would violate voter privacy. The reports in question often contain personal information such as voters' home addresses, and officials said the temporary documents had little informational value as evidence of how the division operates. The campaign said it was not seeking addresses, only a list containing voters' names and their corresponding absentee ballot accept or reject codes, and that its intent was to ensure that all qualified voters had their ballots counted.
Peltola's attorney, Abha Khanna, told the judge that the campaign was not trying to disrupt the counting process and had seen no cause for concern about how it was being run. The campaign has said observers from both sides are already present at the regional offices where absentee review boards meet, and that state law allows ballots to be challenged where there is good reason to suspect a voter is ineligible.
The ruling is the latest development in a race that remains the only US Senate contest still too early to call. Peltola and the Republican candidate, two-term incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan, are the main contenders in the ranked-choice election, and ballots are still being tallied. As of late Wednesday, media tallies showed Peltola with a lead of about 1.6 percent with 86 percent of the votes counted, and her lead had widened to 4,250 votes in the latest count, 118,926 to 114,676, or 48.8 percent to 47.0 percent.
About 40,000 accepted ballots were still waiting to be counted when the ruling was issued, and nearly 2,000 ballots have been rejected so far, more than half of them questioned ballots. The state accepts ballots from overseas voters up to 15 days after general elections, making 18 November the final day to receive them, and if neither candidate tops 50 percent of first-choice votes, the race will be decided by the ranked-choice tabulation on 18 November, with certification targeted for 25 November.
The lawsuit is one of several legal challenges surrounding the Alaska race. Other court battles have concerned the appearance of a second Republican candidate also named Dan Sullivan on the ballot. President Donald Trump and other Republicans had accused the Peltola campaign of working with the second Dan Sullivan, who appeared on the ballot as Daniel J. Sullivan, to siphon votes away from the incumbent senator. Days before the election, a report appeared to confirm that Peltola's political operation had been in touch with him.
Alaska notably has no process allowing a voter to fix a problem with an absentee ballot, such as a forgotten signature on the envelope, which is why the fight over the names of rejected voters has mattered so much to the campaign. With no way to cure a rejected ballot, the names fight is about transparency over the remaining count and about whether voters who thought they had voted will ever know that their ballot was discarded.
The stakes extend beyond Alaska. Democrats have already won a majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, and with Alaska still undecided they hold a 55-44 edge in the Senate. An Alaska win would give them 56 seats. The Sullivan campaign intervened in the lawsuit in support of the state, and its attorney asked that if the judge ordered any records produced, they be made equally and simultaneously available to all candidates in the race.
