This week the New York Times reported that people tied to Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign and national Democrats spent months recruiting candidates to siphon votes from Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, including a retired Petersburg schoolteacher who happens to be named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. Within a day the President was calling for prosecutions, the Governor ordered an investigation, DOJ issued subpoenas and the House Oversight Committee opened a probe.
If you only watched the news, you’d think Alaskans were walking into voting booths unable to tell which Dan Sullivan was which. So let’s look at the ballot.
On it, Dan S. Sullivan is listed as a registered Republican and the incumbent. Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. has no party affiliation. The state told a court the Division of Elections took significant steps to make the two easy to tell apart.
And none of this is news in Alaska. The two Sullivans have been a running story there since May: the senator calling his namesake a sham candidate, a state investigation in June joined by federal prosecutors by July, court fights that ended with the Alaska Supreme Court keeping him on the ballot.
Unless you’ve been hibernating with the polar bears, you already know there are two Dan Sullivans and which one is the senator.
What’s new?
Not much. Since Trump’s first term, the news has been flooded with claims of cheating. This year alone we’ve had fights over gerrymandering, mail-in ballots and proof of citizenship to vote. Voters have heard “the other side is stealing it” so many times that one more round barely registers.
What interests me is the plan itself. Somebody sat down and decided the way to win a Senate seat was to find a man with the same name and hope voters got confused. And in the primary it worked: with just 2.5% of the vote he finished third, enough to land on the November ballot. And that was on a primary ballot with the same labels, the senator marked as the Republican incumbent and the other Sullivan with no party. Whether those were confused voters, protest votes or Petersburg neighbors backing a local teacher, nobody knows.
Elections have been tipped by a few hundred votes, and in Florida’s 2020 ghost-candidate race the Democrat lost by 32 votes while the decoy pulled more than 6,000. In a race this close, even a sliver of confused voters could decide it. That’s the bet.
But I don’t expect Alaskans to abandon the Democrat over it. They care about the cost of living and the things that touch their own lives. And if voters refused to back any politician caught lying, everyone would be writing in candidates.
Was it legal?
Probably. The Times itself notes that ballot-stacking is common, generally legal and used by both parties in Alaska. Election-law scholar Rick Hasen sees real exposure mainly if someone lied under oath. That Florida case ended with a former state senator convicted of three felonies, but for the $44,000 he paid the candidate, not for the recruiting. Nobody has shown anything like that here yet.
So, are Alaskan voters being tricked?
Maybe a few who don’t read what they’re checking off or don’t know what “incumbent” means. This is a tempest in a teapot. The ballot labels the incumbent Republican and the other Sullivan has no party.