President Donald Trump on Thursday called on officials to shift votes in the still-uncalled Alaska Senate race to Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, in order to defeat Democrat Mary Peltola, who holds a narrow lead.

The president said Alaska authorities should hand Sen. Sullivan all the votes that went to the other two candidates in the race, including a second Republican and an independent who is also called Daniel Sullivan and who Trump charges is a phony decoy candidate.

“The vote totals for the Fake Dan Sullivan, plus the other ‘slug’ that the Dems put on the Ballot, should be immediately given to the REAL Dan Sullivan, and the Election is over – He easily wins. There is no other fair solution!” Trump posted on his social media site.

Trump’s suggestion that Sullivan would win is false because Peltola leads and may wind up with more than 50% of the vote when all ballots are tallied. An estimated 75,000 votes remain uncounted,

His plan would also violate Alaska election law, which includes ranked choice voting, similar to New York City’s mayoral primary. It says that if any candidate winds up with 50% of the final vote count, they win the contest. If no one reaches a majority, the winner will be determined by divvying up the ranked choices of voters who backed the candidates who finished behind them.

Democrats already won control of the Senate by winning at least 54 seats. The contests in Alaska and Mississippi are still up in the air.

Peltola narrowly led Sullivan by fewer than 1,000 votes, or a margin of about 48.2%-to-47.9% in the latest official count Thursday.

The so-called “second Dan Sullivan,” who was listed on the ballot as “Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr.” was in last place with 3,600 votes. Gerald L. Heikes, another Republican, was in third with over 4,800.

Only about 78% of the estimated ballots have been counted, with the remainder of the estimated 75,000 outstanding votes comprising mostly mail-in ballots from remote areas in the state’s sprawling hinterlands.

The votes are unlikely to be completely tabulated until a few days before Thanksgiving.

Those ballots are disproportionately from Native American areas that typically strongly favor Democrats — especially Peltola, who is Native American herself.

In the state’s so-called tundra primary in the summer, Peltola gained several percentage points in her margin over Sullivan from the election night count to the final result, a pattern that many expect to repeat itself in this tally.

The situation is clouded by Trump’s push for a criminal investigation into reports that Democratic operatives with ties to Peltola’s campaign recruited the other candidate named Daniel Sullivan to confuse voters. Peltola denies knowing about such an effort.

A federal judge tossed the case, but Trump’s Department of Justice say it is still investigating

In any case, it’s not obvious how the presence of the second Daniel Sullivan on the ballot could have hurt the incumbent senator. Anyone who was confused could have ranked both Sullivans and their vote would still wind up going to Sen. Dan Sullivan in the ranked choice phase.

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