Alaska’s Dueling Dans Could Give Democrats Control of the Senate, Boosting Effort To Scrap Ranked-Choice Voting

Confusion in Alaska’s Senate election is boosting a ballot measure to repeal the state’s ranked-choice voting system. At the center of the alleged shenanigans are the incumbent, Senator Daniel Scott Sullivan, and a fellow Republican, Daniel James Sullivan, Jr. It’s the latter’s candidacy that Democrats hope tilts the race — and Senate — in their favor.Had Alaska held traditional primaries last Tuesday, Democrat and Republican candidates would have been set when the incumbent senator, Daniel Scott Sullivan, and a former congresswoman, Mary Peltola, captured 42 percent and 49 percent respectively. Under the all-party primary rules, though, the count is ongoing to determine the “Final Four” who appear on November’s ballot.With just 2.5 percent of the vote, Daniel James Sullivan, Jr. captured the third seed ahead of 13 other candidates: Five independents, four Republicans, and two Democrats. Leading that pack are a Democrat and Republican with 1.1 percent or around 1,700 votes each.Just 40 votes separate the fourth- and fifth-place finishers as of Thursday with 11,000 votes left to count. Barring an enormous tally that leapfrogs someone else into the Final Four, one of them will be on the ballot and could end up representing Alaskans in the Senate for the next six years.While hosting “The Derek Hunter Show” on Washington D.C.’s WMAL radio on Friday, this columnist spoke to the executive director of the Honest Elections Project, Jason Snead. His nonpartisan group aims to “stop voter fraud” and campaigns for “election integrity laws protect the value of your vote.”Representative Mary Peltola before a debate October 26, 2022, at Anchorage. AP/Mark ThiessenIn Alaska, Mr. Snead explained, voters rank four candidates instead of making a single choice. Earning 50 percent plus one vote wins. Yet “if your first-place pick gets eliminated in the first round … your ballot is shifted to your second, third, or fourth pick however many times it takes until you can manufacture a quote-unquote ‘majority.’” Mr. Snead called Alaska’s system ripe for “dirty tricks,” saying that “the strategy here seems very simple … confuse enough Republican voters to vote for the wrong Dan Sullivan.” Called “Decoy Dan” for clarity, he “even tried to file using Senator Sullivan’s middle initial, which is not his own.”Alaska’s muddled system “should be nowhere near anything as consequential as a Senate election,” Mr. Snead said. “We’re watching an absolutely bizarre situation unfold where what looks like a plant by the Democrats up in Alaska is actually advancing into the Final Four.”Advocates of multiple-candidate ballots, Mr. Snead said, “took it for a test drive in” a small state “where it’s relatively inexpensive to push ballot measures.” The initiative passed with 50.5 percent support in 2020 and “in 2024, you had well over $100 million campaign funded by left-wing mega donors in six states” that were “pro-ranked choice voting.”Only Maine and Alaska use what Mr. Snead called the “completely convoluted system,” but backers are “pushing it” in “Colorado and Montana, Oregon and Arizona — blue and red states alike.” It “really only exists to do one thing,” he said, “which is to skew politics to the left and sort of divorce voters from their votes and from the results of the elections.”On WMAL, I raised the example of the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1920, President Franklin D. Roosevelt — then New York’s governor — being chosen in hopes that he’d be confused for a son of the Republican, President Theodore Roosevelt. Mr. Snead agreed that such schemes would become the rule rather than the exception if Alaska’s system spreads.“Nobody is saying that” Daniel James Sullivan, Jr. “shouldn’t be able to run,” Mr. Snead said, “but he’s not running a good-faith campaign.” Last week, “he even told the New York Times that he is a donor to Mary Peltola — the Democrat that he claims to be running against.”A repeal of Alaska’s open primaries and ranked-choice general elections fell short in 2024 by the narrowest margin for a ballot measure in the state’s history. Alaskans will get another chance to slam the brakes on this test-drive in November. Yet it will be too late to prevent confusion, which may give them a senator — and a Senate majority — they don’t want.

Alaska’s Dueling Dans Could Give Democrats Control of the Senate, Boosting Effort To Scrap Ranked-Choice Voting

Alaska’s Dueling Dans Could Give Democrats Control of the Senate, Boosting Effort To Scrap Ranked-Choice Voting

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