One State Court Just Changed Elections

Sign reading Vote Here in a polling station.

When Alaska’s Supreme Court declared partisan gerrymandering and new limits on voter engagement unconstitutional, it did more than decide a handful of local disputes—it staked out a state-level model for policing democratic fairness in an era when federal courts have largely walked away from the task.

At a Glance

Alaska’s Supreme Court has explicitly held that partisan gerrymandering violates the state constitution’s equal protection guarantee, joining a small but growing group of state high courts doing the same.^[2]^[3]^[6]
The court also struck down new restrictions on voter registration and outreach, treating them as impermissible limits on political speech and association.^[7]
In a separate but related election-law fight, Alaska courts allowed a second Republican candidate named Dan J. Sullivan onto the ballot, rejecting ad hoc “good faith” tests invented by election officials.^[2]^[5]
These decisions arrive close to primary election deadlines and against a backdrop of intense national polarization, leading conservative commentators to label them “insane” or a partisan “lifeline,” even as the legal reasoning rests on familiar constitutional principles.^[1]^[4]

How Alaska Put Partisan Gerrymandering Under Its Constitution

The most consequential of Alaska’s recent election decisions is the Supreme Court’s ruling in the consolidated “In re 2021 Redistricting Cases,” where the justices held that the state’s legislative map was an “unconstitutional partisan gerrymander” under Alaska’s equal protection doctrine. The litigation grew out of challenges to districts drawn after the 2020 census, particularly the configuration of Anchorage-area Senate districts. Plaintiffs argued that the Alaska Redistricting Board had deliberately engineered boundaries to favor one party, diluting the electoral strength of disfavored voters in violation of the state constitution.^[5]^[6]^[7]

Unlike the U.S. Supreme Court in Rucho v. Common Cause, which declared partisan gerrymandering claims nonjusticiable in federal court, Alaska’s justices went the other way. They reviewed convention records, the legislative history of a 1999 equal protection amendment, and prior Alaska case law, then made their conclusion explicit: “we expressly recognize that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional under the Alaska Constitution.” That sentence matters. Until that moment, many state courts had flirted with the idea that broad guarantees of equality, fairness, or “free elections” might reach extreme partisan map-drawing; Alaska joined a small cohort—including Pennsylvania and North Carolina—that turned those hints into a clear rule.^[2]^[3]^[6]^[9]^[10]^[12]

What distinguishes Alaska’s approach is its focus on intent. The court zeroed in on evidence that the Board acted with “intended discrimination against a class of voters,” treating circumstantial proof of partisan motive—emails, sequence of decisions, and the political effects of map changes—as enough to condemn the plan. The justices did not require a complex statistical showing of skewed seat share or a formal threshold of partisan “effect.” Instead, they treated partisan purpose itself as incompatible with equal protection, reasoning that when a state body draws lines to advantage one party’s voters and disadvantage another’s, it is denying equal treatment to citizens based on political affiliation.^[7]

From a doctrinal standpoint, this is a straightforward equal protection analysis: the state cannot deliberately sort or burden citizens because of a disfavored trait, and in Alaska, partisan identity falls within that protected zone. From a practical standpoint, it is a shot across the bow at redistricting bodies tempted to test the limits of partisanship, signaling that intent-based evidence will be enough to invalidate maps. Harvard Law Review’s assessment of the decision is blunt: by resting on intent, Alaska “provided an avenue to outlaw partisan gerrymandering well suited to stem the current flood of state actors deliberately testing the legal boundaries of partisanship in redistricting.”^[7]

The court did not stop at declaring the map unconstitutional. It ordered the Board to return to Superior Court within 90 days to justify continued use of an interim plan adopted for the 2022 elections or face the prospect of judicially imposed districts. That remedial posture has been attacked by some conservative commentators as the court “gerrymandering for Democrats,” but it tracks the basic logic of structural litigation: once a constitutional violation is found, the court either blesses a valid alternative or, in the absence of one, imposes a remedy itself.^[4]^[5]^[6]

Free Speech, Voter Registration, and the Reach of Political Participation

In parallel to its redistricting ruling, the Alaska Supreme Court confronted a different, but related, attempt to tilt the electoral playing field: new restrictions on voter registration efforts and political outreach. In Alaska Policy Forum v. Alaska Public Offices Commission (S-18533), the court examined regulatory limits on third-party voter engagement and concluded they ran afoul of the state’s free speech protections.^[1]^[7]

Although the details of the regulations are technical, the core problem was familiar. The rules constrained how civic groups and advocacy organizations could solicit registrations, inform voters, and support particular candidates or causes, effectively shrinking the space for political speech at the very entry point to the electoral system. When a court treats partisan gerrymandering as a form of discrimination against voters, it is a short doctrinal step to treating restrictions on registration and outreach as discrimination against speakers and organizers.

Here the Alaska Supreme Court again diverged from a strand of federal doctrine that counsels courts to avoid changing election rules close to voting—the so-called “Purcell principle,” named after a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court case. The State Court Report’s analysis emphasizes that the justices refused to import that federal caution into Alaska law, reasoning that state courts are not bound to leave unconstitutional rules in place simply because an election is coming up. In their view, if a regulation violates free speech or equal protection, it violates those guarantees every day it remains in force; timing is an administrative problem, not a constitutional shield.^[1]^[6]

Seen together, the redistricting and voter-registration decisions form a coherent theory of democratic rights: the state may not manipulate district lines for partisan gain, and it may not choke off citizen efforts to bring new voters into the process or to speak about who should represent them. For Democrats, that theory is politically favorable—more competitive districts and easier registration tend to help them in a state where they have struggled. For the court, the relevant question is not who benefits, but whether rules respect the equal treatment and expressive freedom of citizens.

The Dan Sullivan Ballot Case: Names, Confusion, and the Limits of Administrative Discretion

The headline-grabbing wrinkle in Alaska’s 2026 election law landscape is a case that, at first glance, looks almost too quirky to be serious: whether a Republican candidate named Dan J. Sullivan may appear on the same ballot as incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan. Election officials tried to keep him off, arguing that his candidacy was designed to confuse voters and distort the race. The courts disagreed.^[2]^[5]

Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews held that the Division of Elections’ decision to exclude Dan J. Sullivan was not grounded in any constitutional provision, statute, or promulgated regulation, but instead rested on a novel “good faith” test invented for this case. In administrative law terms, that is nearly a textbook definition of arbitrary action. When an agency charged with enforcing election law constructs ad hoc criteria to deny ballot access—criteria found nowhere in existing law—it steps outside its lawful authority. Judge Matthews’ ruling treated that step as impermissible, and the Alaska Supreme Court allowed the candidate onto the ballot while broader challenges continued.^[2]^[5]^[6]

Critics, especially in conservative media, have seized on the case as evidence that courts are sanctioning deliberate voter confusion. They point out that both men are Republicans, both will be listed as “Dan Sullivan,” and Alaska’s primary ballots are not designed with expansive candidate descriptions. The risk that a hurried voter might mark the wrong “Sullivan” is not fanciful.^[1]^[2]

But legally, that is not the controlling question. The issue for the courts was whether the state had valid, preexisting legal authority to bar a qualified candidate solely because his presence might confuse some voters or strategically complicate a race. Absent such authority, refusing ballot access would have been an unconstitutional burden on candidacy and voter choice. American election law has long tolerated the possibility of confusion—from candidates with similar names to crowded fields—on the theory that voters bear some responsibility for knowing whom they are selecting, and that the state’s role is to set neutral qualifications, not to curate the ballot to produce a particular strategic landscape.

The Dan Sullivan case thus illustrates a deeper principle running through Alaska’s recent decisions: election administrators may not improvise new standards in the heat of a contested race. Where the legislature has not authorized a “good faith” filter, and where constitutional text does not speak to name similarity, the impulse to protect voters from confusion cannot justify inventing new barriers to participation.^[5]

Alaska Supreme Court Hears Petersburg Dan Case; Decision Expected Today or Tomorrow

By Natalie Spaulding

This morning, June 29, 2026, the Alaska Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case Dan J. Sullivan vs. Division of Elections, a case concerning the eligibility of a man… pic.twitter.com/o6IXxC3lR1

— Must Read Alaska (@MustReadAlaska) June 29, 2026

Timing, National Context, and the Charge of Partisan “Insanity”

One of the more serious criticisms of Alaska’s rulings is not about the substance of equal protection or free speech, but about timing. The decisions landed in late spring and early summer of an election year, close enough to primary ballot-printing deadlines that Politico warned they could “upend election administration in Alaska just two months before the state’s primaries.” Election officials now have to adjust district lines, ballot layouts, and sometimes voter information materials on compressed timelines, increasing the risk of errors or uneven implementation.^[4]

From an administrator’s vantage point, that concern is real. Every change to districts or ballot qualification triggers a cascade of downstream tasks—database updates, poll worker training, public education—that are easier to manage six months out than six weeks out. From a constitutional vantage point, however, the argument cuts both ways. Keeping a known-gerrymandered map or speech-restrictive regulation in place “for this cycle” means citizens go to the polls under rules the court has already judged illegal. In Alaska’s view, that trade-off favors fixing the law even at the cost of short-term administrative strain.^[1]^[6]

The broader political context makes these choices even more charged. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Rucho decision, state high courts have become the primary forum for partisan gerrymandering litigation; more than forty such suits have been filed across twenty states in the current redistricting cycle, with roughly a third resulting in altered or invalidated maps. Alaska’s ruling fits squarely into that national pattern. What makes it stand out is that it arrives amid nationally televised fights over mail-in ballots, voter ID, and the scope of presidential power, leading commentators to treat a state equal-protection case as another front in a red-blue war rather than a local constitutional dispute.^[4]^[8]^[10]^[11]^[12]^[14]

Conservative outlets have framed the Alaska decisions as a partisan “lifeline” for Democrats—a way to salvage a Senate seat or blunt Republican advantages in the legislature. That political reading is not wrong about the electoral consequences; more competitive maps and an additional candidate on the ballot can indeed change outcomes. But it is incomplete as an account of the law. The equal protection analysis follows a line of state-court reasoning tested in other jurisdictions. The free speech ruling rests on familiar principles of political expression. The ballot-access decision enforces a long-standing requirement that agencies act under color of law, not improvisation.^[1]^[4]

For a reader trying to make sense of whether these rulings are “insane,” the key distinction is between outcomes and methods. Courts do not lose legitimacy because their decisions happen to benefit one party; they lose it when their reasoning departs from text, history, or neutral principle. In Alaska’s case, the rulings are politically consequential and administratively inconvenient, but the legal methods—equal protection against partisan intent, robust protection of political speech, insistence on statutory authority—are neither novel nor unmoored.

What It Means Going Forward

Alaska’s moves will reverberate beyond one election cycle. By cementing partisan gerrymandering as unconstitutional, the Supreme Court has given future plaintiffs a clear cause of action and established that intent-based evidence is enough to win; redistricting bodies now operate under a sharper constraint. By invalidating limits on voter registration and outreach, the court has signaled that attempts to narrow the funnel of political participation will face strict scrutiny.

The Dan Sullivan ballot case, meanwhile, sends a cautionary message to election administrators tempted to stretch their authority in the name of “integrity.” The desire to prevent voter confusion or gamesmanship is understandable, but the tools must be grounded in law, not in the instincts of the moment.

For Alaska’s political actors—Democratic and Republican alike—the immediate task is adjustment: to redraw maps, revise rules, and campaign under a clarified constitutional regime. For observers in other states, the deeper lesson is that the real battleground over how Americans vote has shifted decisively to state constitutions and courts. Alaska’s decisions show how assertive those courts can be when they choose to treat equal protection and free speech as living guarantees for democratic structure, not just individual rights.