It is plainly obvious, only now of course, that everything isn’t what it appears to be with Alaska U.S. Senate candidate Dan Sullivan. Which Dan Sullivan, you may ask? There are two of them on the ballot: the incumbent Republican Dan S. Sullivan and the so-called “independent” candidate Dan J. Sullivan Jr. The initial temptation is to chalk all this up to comedic happenstance and the vaudeville quality of our democratic system.
But recent revelations from The New York Times spell out the deliberate actions that more than suggest it was something far less accidental.
Testimony from former campaign employees, text-messages between aides and national party officials, and a conspicuously named strategy internally called “the ballot composition project” has led even The New York Times to characterize the scheme as “the lengths to which Democrats went to seek advantage in a Senate race that could determine control of the chamber.”
The alleged involvement in this ballot confusion plot of Alaska Democrat candidate Mary Peltola and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have been denied by each of their respective teams. But in this pity, I need hardly add, this is no touch of innocence. When a voter pulls back the curtain and looks down at the ballot, he ought to be making a choice on values, not needing to decipher whether a familiar name has been deliberately duplicated for strategic effect.
The dry logic of the Alaskan Supreme Court reversed an earlier decision that would have knocked Sullivan (the one with the J.) off the ballot because, in the high court’s legal lucidity, Alaska law contains no “good-faith” standard for being a candidate.
Then there’s the response — Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy ordering an investigation and President Donald Trump directing the Justice Department to file a lawsuit: “I think they should be prosecuted. To me, that’s voter fraud at the highest level,” Trump recently miffed to reporters.
Practically, of course, an election with two Dan Sullivans will happen. Alaskans will see on their general-election ballot Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.’s name appear listed without a party label, while Dan S. Sullivan will be branded with two monikers: Registered Republican and Incumbent. Alaska already has rank-choice system sufficiently convoluted to invite quackery, now voters must suffer an alleged Democratic party plot that is without excess refinement.
Alaska’s prohibition on candidate names presented “in a manner that is confusing or misleading” is a locution of majestic vagueness. The ballot integrity also experiences sardonic comedy when names of candidates are ineligible to be affixed “with a designation of any academic, professional, personal, or honorary degree or title held by a candidate.”
Undoubtedly, of course, this has happened before. There’s John F. Kennedy in 1946 and the two Joe Russos. One Russo was a popular Boston city councilor and the other a 27-year-old janitor — with the latter allegedly bribed by Kennedy’s campaign manager to enter the race, according to the West End Museum, “to confuse voters and splits the votes” with the other Russo on the ballot.
Even here in Texas, voters in the 2022 Republican primary were given the chance to vote, once again, for Rick Perry for governor — or so they thought. It wasn’t the former Texas governor and U.S. Secretary of Energy, but someone named Ricky Lynn Perry who sought to appear simply as “Rick Perry” on the ballot — and he was trounced, receiving just 3.1% of the vote.
Elections possess an uncanny genius for attracting harebrained schemes. Some involve cranks and con-men, others with more sophisticated ambitions for extraordinary mischief. Unlike Alaska, Texas has rules for clearly distinguishing candidates who share the same name. And if a candidate tries to pull another “Rick Perry,” they must show proof of being known by the nickname for at least three years — and file an affidavit. But there is still more to be done.
Despite rank choice voting being, in the words of John Bonura at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, “a slow and inefficient system that offers no advantage over the current method of voting,” Texas has stopped short of an outright ban. Way back in 2003, then-Attorney General Greg Abbott produced an opinion with succinct clarity: Texas law “conflicts with, and thereby preempts, instant runoff voting.” Election code in the Lone Star State is irreconcilable with rank choice voting, and if lawmakers want the principle to move beyond mere opinion, then it should be written plainly into statute.
As for Alaska, its failure is marked in the limitations of their courage. Amid the schemes and plots and dirty tricks from those willing to circumvent our electoral arrangement, their deceptive motives could have been quashed with legal foresight. Texas cannot allow timidity to give way to absurdity.