Notre Dame News

October 26, 2026

Derek Muller, an election law professor at the University of Notre Dame, questioned how officials would determine which candidate a voter intended to support. “The best evidence that voters preferred one Sullivan over another is how they marked their ballots,” he wrote on the Election Law blog. Muller also questioned the legal basis of the lawsuit. The Justice Department cited the “findings and purposes” section of the National Voter Registration Act, which lists protecting “the integrity of the electoral process” among the law’s purposes. But Muller argued that the department was treating that statement as a legal obligation, even though the law says nothing about which candidates may appear on a ballot. He described the argument as “so absurdly thin” that there was “essentially no likelihood of success”. He also questioned why the department had waited until days before the election to intervene when the dispute over the two candidates had been known for months.