A Federal Criminal Investigation Shadows Alaska's Senate Race Two Days Before the Midterms

Two days before an election that decides control of Congress, the legal fights around the vote widened again on Sunday. Reuters reported that the Trump administration is pressing a criminal investigation in Alaska's pivotal Senate race — a contest that could matter to a Senate the Republicans hold 53-47 — even as the president campaigned in Iowa and Kansas for Senate seats in his own party's column.

The second front is the one New York readers have been following in this newsroom: the administration said on Saturday it would likely take its fight over thousands of California mail ballots to the U.S. Supreme Court, with any request coming before Tuesday's election. A federal judge rejected the Justice Department's bid to block ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters the department says are likely noncitizens, a federal appeals court declined an emergency request, and California says its safeguards against noncitizen voting — which is illegal — are robust.

Reuters, which spoke to voters in Anchorage on Saturday, found mixed views there on the investigation and the legal fights — a reminder that these are contested actions in a contested election, reported here as Reuters reported them, with no detail added beyond the wire's account.

The stakes underneath the litigation are the whole government: 35 Senate seats and all 435 House seats are on Tuesday's ballot, losing either chamber would let Democrats block the president's agenda for his final two years, and more than 52 million Americans — a midterm record, by the University of Florida's Election Lab count — have already voted. New York's own polls run Tuesday from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., inside a national election whose legal weather is still changing.