ANCHORAGE, Alaska — As the Trump administration launched a preemptive attack on election results in Alaska’s critical U.S. Senate race, some polling places in rural villages key to Democratic hopes have been slow to open, tribal leaders and voting-rights activists say.

What they don’t know is if the closed polling places are a result of a purposeful attempt to block thousands from voting or because voting has always been tricky to manage in the far-flung, rural villages of Alaska’s wilderness.

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the state of Alaska at the president’s request seeking to block certification of the Senate election in Alaska if the Republican incumbent narrowly loses.

Their argument, which many legal observers have dismissed as unlikely to succeed, was that voters intending to cast ballots for the incumbent could mistakenly choose another candidate with the same name. They asked the federal court to preemptively agree to intervene should that happen.…