Lazy Caturday Reads: The Midterm Elections, Three Days Out.

A federal judge on Friday ordered the Justice Department to stop threatening state and local election officials with criminal prosecution over their handling of disputes about voter qualifications.

U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson also ordered the Trump administration to cease demanding that election workers remove voters from statewide rolls, refuse to issue ballots to specific voters or segregate ballots cast in the midterms based on the administration’s claims that some voters are ineligible.

“Because the public has a paramount interest in ensuring that election officials and workers are able to carry out their work in accordance with federal law and election procedure, and the official day of the Elections is only a couple of days away, the balance of the equities and public interest weigh in Plaintiffs’ favor,” Thompson wrote.

Thompson, a San Francisco-based Biden appointee, issued the temporary restraining order in connection with a lawsuit brought by the Service Employees International Union and other groups. Her directive also requires the DOJ to reach out to any state or local officials who received warnings about possible prosecution and inform them that “demands and threats of prosecution to election officials and workers … have been enjoined.”

The Justice Department on Thursday sent letters to election workers in all 50 states alluding to possible prosecution if they didn’t preserve election records. DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the judge’s broad ruling.

Tierney Sneed at CNN: Judge imposes sweeping emergency order halting DOJ pressure campaign on election officials across the country.

A federal judge imposed a sweeping emergency order halting various aggressive tactics employed by the Trump administration in recent days to pressure election officials across the country.

“Although Defendants claim that their actions are designed to halt unlawful voting by noncitizens, their actions are likely to have the effect of interfering with election administration and disenfranchising lawful voters,” US District Judge Trina Thompson said in her opinion granting a temporary restraining order Friday evening.

She said, while her order is in place, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security cannot demand that election officials in any state segregate ballots, purge voters from voter rolls, or halt ballot processing. Thompson, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, is also blocking threats of criminal prosecutions against election officials from those agencies and said that the administration cannot take other actions that “threaten, intimidate or coerce” election officials to demand changes in ballot processing procedures on claims the voters are ineligible.

Thompson’s opinion rebuked claims the administration has made for months that it can and will prosecute election officials for not doing enough to prevent illegal voting.

“When state and local government employees perform the work of distributing, processing, or counting ballots or otherwise administering the 2026 midterm election” in accordance with the law, “they do not violate federal criminal law even if a particular ballot belongs to a registered voter alleged by Defendants to be ineligible to vote,” she wrote.

She is also requiring the administration inform her of any “search warrant applications, grand jury subpoenas, or other demands to access election materials or ballots” that have been issued related to lists the administration has created to allege individuals are ineligible to vote.

There’s much more at the CNN link.

The situation in Alaska is concerning. The New York Times published an article claiming that the Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola was involved in a conspiracy to confuse voters by adding a candidate to the ballot with the same name as the Republican candidate. Peltola denies any involvement in this effort. This tactic has frequently been used by Republicans and is not a crime, but the DOJ has announced a criminal investigation of Peltola’s campaign. Some Democrats are accusing the NYT of a similar tactic to their late attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016. Meanwhile, the Time completely ignore a new accusation of rape against Trump.

Jamison Foser at Finding Gravity: The New York Times invents a Democratic scandal while ignoring a new Trump rape allegation.

America is four days out from the end of an election in which America’s deeply unpopular fascist ruling party is trying to retain control of Congress. The week began with yet another new rape allegation against the president of the united states, a man who has already been found liable for sexual assault in another case. The president and his allies are frantically whipping up hatred and anger at racial minorities in a continuation of a decade-long effort to inspire and incite violence against those who oppose them. They continue to disappear people off of American streets without trial, wage a figurative war against free expression and a literal war that has driven up prices for American families, all while plundering the treasury for their own financial gain.

Against that backdrop, the national news media is doing everything they can to make the central story of the last days of this election season an alleged political maneuver by Alaska Democrats that was, by all accounts, legal, consistent with past behavior by both major political parties, and unlikely to have any real effect on the outcome of the Alaska Senate race. America’s dominant news companies, led by the New York Times, have literally ignored the new rape allegation against the president of the United States while breathlessly hyping the Alaska maneuver, giving Donald Trump the distraction he desperately seeks and a phony premise for his anti-democratic efforts to effectively cancel a Senate election that could determine control of the entire U.S. Senate. It is, in the most charitable assessment, a gross and feckless abandonment of the news media’s responsibility to provide voters the information they need to make considered decisions about the future of their country.

Here’s the Alaska situation: The New York Times reported allegations that people associated with the campaign of Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola recruited an Alaskan named Dan Sullivan to run for the Senate in order to siphon votes away from incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan.

This no doubt strikes some people as unsportsmanlike, but it is important to understand a few things:

1) It is legal.

2) There is ample precedent for this precise maneuver, as well as countless others that are merely similar, from both political parties, both this election season and historically.

3) This particular maneuver is exceedingly unlikely to have an effect on the outcome of the Alaska senate race, because Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, which means that any Alaskan who wants to vote for the Republican incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan but who is somehow confused about which Dan Sullivan he is on the ballot despite the fact that only one Dan Sullivan on the ballot is identified with the words “Republican” or “incumbent” can simply rank the two Dan Sullivans as first and second choices in either order and that vote will ultimately be counted for the Republican incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan.

Read more at the link.

More on this story from Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Inside Trump’s Dark Plot to Keep Senate in GOP Hands Even If Dems Win.

On Thursday night, the Republican governor of Alaska refused to commit to certifying the outcome in the Senate race if Democrat Mary Peltola wins. Which means that if she does triumph, refusing to seat Peltola could well become a cause célèbre on the right—one that Donald Trump requires Republicans to commit to under threat of excommunication from MAGA.

Democrats are already preparing for a range of scenarios along these lines. And while this GOP gambit is very unlikely to succeed, it could get awfully nasty.

Governor Mike Dunleavy’s comments came in a discussion about the controversial report this week that Democrats conspired to get a second “Dan Sullivan” on the ballot to siphon votes from GOP Senator Dan Sullivan. The governor has ordered a criminal probe of the move, and a reporter asked him if he’ll certify the election if she’s still under that investigation.

“If we conclude that there were things that should not have happened, that are illegal, we will act on that,” Dunleavy said. “That may in fact impact whether somebody is seated in the U.S. Senate.” [….]

How bad was this plot? In my view, it’s scummy and antidemocratic conduct. But it’s routine, as ratfucking goes. Indeed, Democrats quickly cited numerous examples of Republicans engaged in lots of similar chicanery. Let’s get real: We live in a world where Trump ordered multiple GOP state legislatures to execute extreme gerrymanders for the explicitly declared purpose of holding the House, where Trump has called on congressional Republicans to seize control of state-administered elections, and where Trump still won’t commit to accepting a midterm defeat.

In that world, the Alaska saga is pretty damn small electoral potatoes. The ballot will be clearly labeled by party, and it’s unlikely to make any difference. Besides, as I wrote in my 2018 book, if only one side adheres to norms of fair play in politics, that is itself destabilizing. Generally speaking, mutual escalation of hardball tactics may be the only way to compel some kind of détente over time.

All that aside, the second “Dan Sullivan” says his decision to run was his own, and state courts (in a separate lawsuit) have already upheld his right to do so. Yet Trump’s Justice Department is already suing to force Alaska not to certify the results, insisting the second “Dan Sullivan” will invalidate any outcome (other than a GOP victory, of course).