Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews denied the Mary Peltola campaign's request for records on rejected absentee ballots in Alaska's still-uncalled Senate race.
The Peltola campaign sued Alaska last week over rejected absentee ballots. A spoiler candidate also named Dan Sullivan is on the same ballot.
According to The Associated Press, as of Thursday evening, with 86% of the vote tallied, Democrat Mary Peltola led Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan by about 3,975 votes. Peltola had 121,487 votes, or 48.88%, and Sullivan had 117,512 votes, or 47.28%. The other Dan Sullivan had 4,100 votes, or 1.65%.
On Wednesday evening, Matthews ruled against the Peltola campaign. The Hill reported that the campaign had asked for a list of rejected absentee ballots.
Matthews wrote that Alaska's Division of Election is "currently busy processing ballots from the 2026 general election" and "simply lacks the capacity to generate the report from" the voter registration database (VREM) at the campaign's request.
"Such electronic services are not mandatory, but permissive. And the request must be reasonable," Matthews said in his 17-page ruling. "Even if the request were otherwise considered reasonable outside the peak election time of year, it is simply not reasonable nor required right now."
"Because of the difficulty in disclosing VREMS records, the DOE is not required to disclose VREMS records," the ruling said.
The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into Daniel J. Sullivan, and federal prosecutors have issued more than 100 subpoenas. Last Tuesday, the department sent 20 criminal target letters to 20 Democrats, including lawyer Marc Elias.
Elias and other Democrats are targets of the department's investigation into whether Democratic operatives in the Peltola campaign were behind a plan to confuse Alaska voters by adding a spoiler candidate named Dan Sullivan to the ballot.
