The controversy over two Dan Sullivans appearing on the ballot in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race has echoes of a 2020 Florida state senate contest, where a former Republican state senator was accused of paying a candidate who shared the Democratic incumbent’s last name to run and siphon away votes. Unlike the Florida case, the allegations surrounding Alaska’s race remain under investigation.
But both controversies center on candidates with the same or similar names appearing on the ballot and focus on a political strategy—“ballot stacking"—which is more common in the U.S. than one might imagine and generally not illegal. Under Alaska’s ranked choice voting system, the top four candidates in the U.S. Senate primary earlier this year are set to appear on the ballot on November 3.
These include Alaska native and former congresswoman Mary Peltola, running as a Democrat; Republican Senator Dan Sullivan, the incumbent; Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired teacher and fishing enthusiast with no previous experience in politics, who initially filed his candidacy as a Republican; and Gerald "Jerry" Heikes, a drywall contractor also running as a Republican. The presence of a second Dan Sullivan on the ballot long irked President Donald Trump, who in recent months repeatedly criticized Alaska’s ranked choice voting system and accused the Democrats of "cheating" by putting a sham candidate on the ballot.
The Last Frontier’s election officials similarly thought that Sullivan Jr.’s candidacy was not genuine. Earlier this year, the Alaska election authority had concluded Sullivan Jr. was not an actual good-faith candidate, but his name was reinstated on the ballot in June after an Alaska trial court ruled against that exclusion and the Alaska Supreme Court summarily affirmed that decision. The debate around the other Dan Sullivan escalated when Trump ordered his administration last month to file a lawsuit seeking to block certification of the race’s result if Sullivan loses and votes cast for Sullivan Jr. would have helped him win.
According to the lawsuit, "the sole purpose of [Daniel J. Sullivan’s] candidacy is to benefit the Peltola campaign by reducing the number of votes for Senator Sullivan." Peltola’s team and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit before Election Day, accusing the Trump administration of setting the ground "to falsely suggest that there is doubt about the lawfulness of Alaska’s election results, without any legal basis, to lay the groundwork for unlawful efforts to challenge a potential Peltola victory." A week into the legal debate, reporting by the New York Times that Democrats in Alaska had actually tried to stack the ballot with a second Dan Sullivan put another spin in the controversy. Democratic candidate Mary Peltola’s former campaign manager and longtime aide Elisa Rios told the newspaper that Democratic operatives made efforts to recruit a namesake challenger to the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan Sullivan.
They eventually found Sullivan Jr., who filed his candidacy as a Republican this spring. He has recently switched his political affiliation to "undeclared." According to Rios, Peltola was not involved in these efforts to recruit a candidate that could siphon votes away from Sullivan, but was "definitely aware." Peltola has denied any knowledge of efforts to recruit another Sullivan. The Trump administration included these allegations into its lawsuit, though Peltola’s team dismissed them as "nonsense" and said they did not change the validity of the claim made by the Justice Department.
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