Vance dings media for not pressing Democrats on Alaska Senate race shenanigans

Vice President JD Vance defended President Donald Trump’s decision to direct the Justice Department to stop the automatic certification of the Alaska Senate race results if Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) does not win.The race has been complicated by Alaska’s atypical election system in which the four candidates with the most support in an open primary advance to the general election.This election cycle has been further complicated by the fact that there is another Republican in the race, Dan J. Sullivan, in addition to Republican Gerald Heikes. The incumbent senator is listed as “Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican) Incumbent” on a sample ballot, with the other Dan Sullivan listed as “Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr.” “You guys should actually do your job and ask some difficult questions of the Democratic Party,” Vance told reporters Tuesday. “Why are they trying to confuse people? You’re right. A lot of people won’t fall for it, but some people are going to be confused by that. It’s just human nature.”Vance added, during a brief press conference on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews en route to a campaign rally in Michigan, that “if the shoe was on the other foot, if we were running somebody whose name was Mary Peltola in the state of Alaska, the media would be accusing us of election fraud.”“A lot of Alaskans are going to go and look at the ballot and realize exactly what you said, that this is all a big fraud,” Vance also said on Tuesday. “But people are busy. People have lives. People have jobs, and when you put a person on the ballot explicitly to try to confuse voters, I think that’s the definition of electoral fraud. And I don’t think that we should endorse it.”AMY ACTON’S COVID RECORD IS COMING BACK TO HAUNT HERTrump has complained that the inclusion of a second Dan Sullivan on the ballot is a Democratic ploy to help Democrat Mary Peltola win the race a week from Tuesday.The Justice Department filed its lawsuit last week in federal court in Alaska, citing the National Voter Registration Act, asking the judge to block certification of the state’s Senate race until the government has investigated whether votes for Dan J. Sullivan were intended for the senator.