Two Dan Sullivans on the Alaska ballot: what is proven and what is alleged

Alaska votes on Tuesday, and its Senate race has turned into an argument about who put a second Dan Sullivan on the ballot. On October 28, The New York Times reported that operatives aligned with Democrat Mary Peltola spent months recruiting minor candidates to pull votes from Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, including a namesake. Peltola’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee deny it. Separately, the Justice Department has sued to stop the state certifying the result if Sullivan loses. The two disputes are linked in the headlines but are different in substance.

The documented facts are few and firm. On June 29, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that retired teacher Dan J. Sullivan must be allowed on the ballot. The ballot lists the senator as a registered Republican and incumbent, and the challenger as Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. The Justice Department filed its suit late on a Thursday, seeking to block certification if the Republican incumbent loses, and Trump said he ordered it. In the August primary Peltola led with 49.5 percent to Sullivan’s 41.4 percent. Nobody disputes any of this.

The Times’s central claim, that a coordinated “ballot composition project” existed, is another matter. The paper cites twelve people with knowledge of the effort, text messages and documents prepared for a possible lawsuit. Its main on-record source is Elisa Rios, Peltola’s former campaign manager, fired in August, who said Peltola was “definitely aware” but not directly involved. The Times says she later tried to retract her statements but that they matched its other reporting. She has a grievance against the campaign, and a consultant named in the story dismissed her account as coming from a disgruntled source. Her testimony is therefore not independent confirmation.

The denials are firm but limited. The campaign said it “has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign,” and the DSCC said it “is not involved with Dan J. Sullivan.” Both address the Petersburg candidate, not the Times’s wider allegations about other recruits, an operative named Jerid Kurtz and a floated “MAGA party.” A pro-Peltola PAC denied paying Kurtz, although filings cited by the Times show a payment to a firm he co-owns. I found no outlet that independently confirmed the Times’s evidence. Reports from Breitbart and Townhall largely restate it, so the amount of coverage should not be read as verification.

If the allegations are true, what do they amount to? Recruiting spoiler candidates is not illegal, and the Times notes both parties have done it in Alaska. The state’s nonpartisan top-four primary lets candidates choose a party label without party vetting, which makes the tactic cheap. The troubling elements would be the alleged secrecy, including a pseudonym and cover stories, and the reported involvement of a national party committee and its law firm. That would be a serious political and ethical problem for Peltola, but not a legal ground for removing her.

This is why the lawsuit only loosely depends on the Times story. The Justice Department argues that similar names could confuse voters, not that Democrats recruited the man. Legal experts have been scathing. Notre Dame professor Derek Muller said the statute does not let the Justice Department block certification, and other commentators called it one of the weakest cases they had seen. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Sullivan ally, called it a gross misuse of the department, and the state has asked a judge to dismiss it immediately. The department replies that Alaska’s own election officials, who are Republicans, tried to remove the second Sullivan, but the state’s courts overruled them.

The final margin will decide how much any of this matters. Experts say the case would probably not be ready for argument until after the election, and it only bites if Sullivan loses by fewer votes than his namesake receives. A comfortable win for either candidate makes it moot. The Times’s allegations work differently. They cannot change a certified result, but they could colour how voters and the Senate treat a close one.

Readers should keep three things apart: the court history and the lawsuit, which are documented; the recruitment effort, which is credibly reported but unconfirmed elsewhere and flatly denied; and the Justice Department’s legal theory, which is widely seen as weak whether or not the recruitment happened.

Sources: CBS News, ABC News, WION, Scripps News, Ballotpedia, Votebeat, Alaska Public Media, Alaska Public Media (state response), Alaska Beacon, KSL/AP, Democracy Docket, Breitbart and Townhall.