The Truth About the Alaska Dan Sullivan Shenanigans

Jurisprudence Dan Sullivan and Dan Sullivan. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Jacquelyn Martin - Pool/Getty Images and Campaign photo by Dan Sullivan. Sign up for Executive Dysfunction, a weekly newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story about how Trump is changing the law—or how the law is pushing back—and keeps you posted on the latest from Slate’s Jurisprudence team. Earlier this week, the New York Times published a splashy feature detailing how allies of Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee in this year’s Senate race in Alaska, worked to “stack” the ballot with candidates who could help her defeat the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan. As a result of these efforts, when Alaskans go to the polls next week, appearing alongside Peltola and Sullivan on the ballot will be one Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired teacher who voted for Peltola in previous elections—and who, according to the Times, was recruited by Democratic operative types to play the spoiler role. The Times’ implicit framing of Daniel J. Sullivan’s candidacy as an election-swinging dirty trick requires a few caveats. First and most importantly, Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, which means that Sen. Sullivan supporters confused by their two options can simply vote for both. Second, Peltola beat Sen. Sullivan by eight points in the August primary, and Daniel J. Sullivan picked up 2.5 percent of the vote—significant, sure, but nowhere close to Peltola’s margin of victory. Third, Alaska officials have taken great pains to distinguish the two Sullivans on the ballot, displaying their names differently and designating Dan Sullivan as the “incumbent.” Also, just speaking practically here, if you believed that the presence in a tightly contested Senate race of a person with the same name as a vulnerable incumbent in a tough year for Republicans was a complete coincidence, I have on good authority that the bridge to nowhere is getting built after all, and I would sell it to you for a favorable price. None of these facts have prevented President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans from getting very angry about this stunt. Before the Times story was published, Justice Department officials, at Trump’s direction, had filed a lawsuit seeking to block state officials from certifying the results if Peltola beats Dan Sullivan by less than Daniel J. Sullivan’s share of the vote. (Again, thanks to ranked-choice voting, this scenario is extremely farfetched, but stay with me.) After the Times story, Trump went much further, calling for criminal charges against Peltola and the “FAKE Dan Sullivan.” He also demanded that both of them be removed from the ballot, which would give Republicans nervous about losing the Senate one fewer seat to worry about. Sure enough, on Wednesday, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, announced that state officials were looking at “whether this scheme violated Alaska’s laws.” The Justice Department, which had an eye on the race already, issued new subpoenas to Democrats linked to the non-senator Sullivan, whose candidacy Attorney General Todd Blanche described as “cheating” and “fraud.” As is true of all breathless invocations of voter fraud by Republican politicians, however, Blanche’s claims do not hold up to scrutiny. The reality he is glossing over is that, as you would probably expect, there have already been legal challenges to Sullivan’s candidacy, based in part on some of the details in the Times story. In June, though, an Alaska court determined that under state law, he has the same right to run for office as Sen. Dan Sullivan or anyone else. What Peltola’s campaign (allegedly) did might be partisan skullduggery, but it is probably not illegal, and no one is getting kicked off the ballot or going to prison over it. This case started back in May, when Daniel J. Sullivan filed to run for Senate as a Republican, despite never having previously been affiliated with the party. After the state GOP complained, the Alaska Division of Elections determined that under state law, Daniel J. Sullivan was ineligible to run because he did not file “in good faith for the purpose of genuinely pursuing election,” and instead sought to “confuse or mislead” voters. The letter noted, for example, his request to be identified as “Dan,” like the incumbent. It also alluded to the subject matter of the Times story, highlighting his work with a political consultant who is a “known longtime supporter of Democratic candidates,” including Peltola. Sullivan appealed, and in June, an Alaska trial court judge reversed the Division of Elections’s decision. The gist of Judge Thomas A. Matthews’s order, which the Alaska Supreme Court later affirmed, is that under state law, the qualifications to run for Senate straightforwardly track the language of the U.S. Constitution: Candidates must be at least 30 years old and citizens for at least nine years, and live in the state they seek to represent. Given that Daniel J. Sullivan checks all three boxes, Matthews found that officials had no authority to invent an additional “good-faith” requirement and use it to “exclude an otherwise qualified candidate.” Matthews’s opinion does not suggest that he is naive about what’s going on here. But critical to his analysis is the fact that under state law, the Division of Elections could have previously taken steps to prevent this from happening, but didn’t: He points out that other states have dealt with same-name races, and that many states have rules for weighing the “good faith” of prospective candidates. Since Alaska officials “could have predicted this situation would eventually arise,” Matthews concluded, they “may not now assert a new requirement, standard, limitation, or qualification after presentation of the candidate’s declaration.” The attention generated by the Times story has Republicans looking to impose consequences that go well beyond the confines of Alaska election law. The challenge they face is that, as the Times acknowledged, ballot-stacking techniques are “common in politics,” “generally considered legal,” and have been “employed by both parties in Alaska.” Peltola knows this better than most: In 2024, when she lost her bid for re-election to the House, Republicans went to court to ensure that Eric Hafner, who is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence in New York for threatening to kill judges, remained on the ballot as a Democrat. During the primary campaign in this very election, outside groups were pouring money into the state, hoping to sabotage Peltola by placing other Democrats on the general election ballot. Intuitively, recruiting a candidate with the same name as another candidate feels like a more nefarious form of ballot-stacking. But so far, Republicans’ efforts to draw a legal distinction have been vague, speculative, nonsensical, or some combination thereof. On Truth Social, for example, Trump claimed that the Times revealed that Democrats had lied “under oath in Federal Court,” which is an accurate description of a crime, but not a thing that happened here. The Wall Street Journal reported that federal prosecutors are “exploring” whether to “bring charges alleging a conspiracy to violate voters’ rights.” There are real laws that protect these rights, but prosecutors generally use them to target people who threaten voters or try to trick them into not voting—for example, this guy, who in 2016 posted memes urging Hillary Clinton supporters to “vote” via text message. (Even that conviction was overturned on appeal.) Whatever you think of Daniel J. Sullivan’s candidacy, it is not an illegal effort to stop people from voting: He is running for office, under his real name, in the state where he lives. Anyone who gets “tricked” into voting for him (and only for him) is still, in fact, voting. Even if one of the more ambitious Trump prosecutors decides to give it a shot, the First Amendment will present serious challenges, since going after candidates and their supporters for ostensibly harboring ulterior motives would criminalize a lot of things that parties in this country already do. In context, the threats Republicans are issuing right now are best understood not as fully baked legal theories, but as performances intended to convey to Trump that they, too, are angry about getting played, and are looking into it very strongly. Dunleavy, Alaska’s governor, told the Wall Street Journal that he told Trump that he is “investigating at the state level,” which is what I would tell the incensed leader of my party if I knew he wanted me to do something, but there was little I could do, and less than a week in which to do it. The more likely (and more serious) implication of the story is the possibility of Trump and his allies using it as the basis of a new round of “stolen election” allegations. By loudly investigating the matter now, they are leaving open the possibility of challenging the results, not with oafish phone calls or a horde of Trump supporters storming the Capitol, but with the institutional power of the Justice Department. Citing unproven allegations to pressure Alaska officials not to certify a hypothetical Peltola victory—Dunleavey has said he is open to holding up the process, “depending upon the outcomes of this investigation”—feels like a long shot, but if control of the Senate comes down to Alaska, Trump is at least going to take it. The one bit of good news here is that if this Alaska Public Media report is any indication, actual voters do not care all that much. One described the allegations as “nothing that we haven’t heard before.” Others expressed frustration with all the media focus on the ballot, rather than the policy positions of the people on it. Still others understandably took offense at the notion that Alaskans are not smart enough to figure out how to vote. This is shady business. But for better and for worse, in this country, “shady” is just how politics works. Department of Justice Donald Trump Jurisprudence Senate Judiciary Alaska 2026 Midterms