Less than two weeks before Election Day, President Trump’s Justice Department asked a federal court to stop Alaska from certifying its U.S. Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses to Democrat Mary Peltola. The lawsuit claims that a second candidate on the ballot, Daniel J. Sullivan, will confuse voters. That argument went nowhere in June, when the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that the state had no legal way to remove him from the ballot. Asked about the suit, the president took credit. “I’m the one that said do it,” he told reporters.
Alongside the Alaska suit, the Trump administration sued California to keep the state from counting mail ballots from 20,000 people it calls “likely” noncitizens. Over the summer, the Department of Homeland Security put that number at 190,000. Legal experts expect both suits to fail, as so many suits like them have. Still, Alaska and California give us an early look at what the weeks after November 3rd could bring: recount demands, calls to review or throw out ballots, and pressure to delay seating winners.
These efforts can do a lot of damage even when courts reject them, because every week of delay leaves voters without the representative they chose. Election officials, judges, reporters and voters need to prepare now, before the first post-election challenge arrives.
And the challenges will arrive. Whoever holds power over who takes a seat has used it before, and the delay always lands on voters.
After the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his allies filed over 60 lawsuits challenging results in states he lost, and most of them failed due to a lack of evidence. In Michigan, Republican canvassers in Wayne County blocked certification for hours before reversing course. The suits lost, but they still caused major political delays.
Delay can come from inside Congress, too. Take, for instance, Rep. Adelita Grijalva, who won Arizona’s 7th District special election on September 23, 2025, but wasn’t sworn in until November 12th, 50 days later. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s explanation kept changing: first he was waiting for official results, then for the House to return to session, then for the government shutdown to end. Critics pointed to her pledge to sign the Epstein discharge petition. Democrats noted that Johnson had sworn in two Republicans, Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine, on a day the House had gone out of session. Arizona’s attorney general sued to try to force the swearing-in, and Johnson called the suit “patently absurd.” Still, Grijalva took her seat only when the House came back.
In this case, one official’s discretion over procedure kept more than 800,000 Arizonans without a vote in the House for seven weeks.
To be sure, seating disputes are rare. The House last refused to seat a certified winner on the first day of a new Congress in 1985, when the Democratic majority declined to seat Indiana Republican Richard McIntyre and, months later, seated his Democratic opponent by four votes. Federal law also requires the House clerk to list members whose credentials show they were elected under state and federal law, which leaves little room for personal or political discretion. But little room and no room are different, and the limited space still provides room for a long fight.
Preparing for that fight belongs to all of us.
State officials already know certification timelines. It’s their job to know. They should publish those timelines now and meet them to build public trust. Knowing that legal interference is coming, courts should be prepared to schedule expedited hearings so challenges can’t run on forever. Reporters should explain, now, that slow counts and recounts in close races are normal rather than signs of fraud, and they should separate filed lawsuits from proven problems. Both parties could also publicly commit to seating every certified winner when the new Congress convenes on Jan. 3rd.
Voters have work to do, too. We can learn our state’s certification deadlines and give the counts the time they need without claiming fraud. Millions of people vote, and counting every ballot takes a little while. We also need to remember that when a television network calls a race, that call is a media organization’ projection. It isn’t the official result, and no one ever officially wins on election day. The certified count decides who wins.
The lawsuits in Alaska and California show us that legal battles are coming. The delay in seating Arizona’s 7th District Representative shows that even when the winner is clear, it can take weeks for that person to take office. If the challenges after November 3rd go the way these suits suggest, voters in other states could wait just as long, or longer for the representation the Constitution promises them.
We still have time to hold the people in power to that promise.
Stephanie Toliver is a Public Voices Fellow and a member of the OpEd Alumni Project sponsored by the University of Illinois.
