Should it be illegal to run for office against someone with your same name?
This year, Alaska conducted its primary elections on August 18.
Under a 2020 ballot measure, voters in the state pick from all qualified candidates for a single office, regardless of party, and the four highest-scoring contenders move on to the general election.
In the U.S. Senate race within the Republican primary, incumbent Dan Sullivan secured 41 percent of the vote, while former Representative Mary Peltola, running as a Democrat, attracted close to half of the total.
But there was also a separate contestant named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired educator who is running as a Republican, though he is not the same individual as Daniel S. Sullivan, the sitting junior senator for Alaska.
The existence of two candidates with the name Dan Sullivan has proven troublesome for GOP strategists, who have tried to keep Daniel J. off the ballot to prevent vote-splitting that could cost their preferred Sullivan a seat.
“Mary Peltola and Chuck Schumer know they can’t defeat Senator Sullivan on the merits of his record, so they are resorting to deceitful political tactics meant to mislead Alaskans and seize a seat,” a Republican spokesperson told Fox News.
“We are looking into it,” said former President Donald Trump earlier this week. “It’s a disgrace.” In fact, NBC News reported in July that federal authorities—the FBI and the Department of Justice—had launched an inquiry “into possible wire fraud or a conspiracy to deprive Alaskan voters of a free and fair elections process, which could constitute a civil rights violation.”
In August, subpoenas apparently went out, though Daniel J. subsequently claimed he had not received any.
But does what he is doing cross a legal line? And more broadly, should it?
Carol Beecher, who heads the Alaska Division of Elections, moved to keep Daniel J. off the ballot in June, saying he ran with the aim of confusing voters and compromising the fairness of the ballot.
Nevertheless, a state superior court reversed that ruling. “Despite the Division’s claim that Mr. Sullivan could be barred for lacking ‘good-faith,’ there is no statute articulating such a criterion,” wrote Judge Thomas A. Matthews. “The notions of ‘good-faith,’ motives, or bona fide intent simply do not exist in the law.” The Alaska Supreme Court ultimately allowed both Sullivans to remain on the November ballot.
Granted, it seems highly likely that Republicans are correct in suspecting that Daniel J. is intentionally targeting Daniel S.’s electoral prospects.
“Campaign materials metadata show Amber Lee, a progressive consultant, authored a press release announcing [Daniel J.’s] Senate campaign,” WFMD reported in May.
Daniel J. told The New York Times that he was positioning himself as a moderate Republican in a bid to move the party away from its MAGA wing. He also acknowledged that in the last three presidential elections he had voted for a Democrat and that he supported Peltola in her House campaigns.
In Beecher’s initial order barring Daniel J. from the ballot, she asserted that Daniel J. had requested to be identified as “Dan S. Sullivan” on the ballot—the same designation as the sitting senator. (Alaska journalist Dermot Cole noted in July that this was not accurate: Daniel J. had written “Dan S. Sullivan” in an email to Beecher but soon corrected it to “Dan J. Sullivan.”)
If Daniel J.’s goal is indeed to mislead voters, such conduct would be indefensible. Yet it remains unclear whether it constitutes a crime, or whether it ought to.
“I’m not sure exploiting voter confusion about names is any more egregious than exploiting their lack of knowledge about policy issues like crime, immigration, and health care,” commented Ilya Somin, a professor of law at George Mason University. “Efforts to curb such exploitation through criminal or civil liability would likely infringe the First Amendment and could empower incumbents to suppress speech and muzzle campaigns in ways they cannot be trusted with.”
“This case involves someone seeking office with impure motives who happens to have a name that could mislead some voters,” added election-law expert Richard Hasen. “I don’t see how the government could criminalize running for office merely for impure motives. And if it could, then it could criminalize the GOP backing a Green Party candidate, or Democrats backing a MAGA candidate in a primary to make the eventual general election easier for the opposing party. This sort of thing happens all the time.”
Still, Alaska’s ranked-choice voting framework might render the dispute moot on Election Day.
Under Alaska’s system, after the August open primary, the top four finishers compete using a ranked-choice ballot, in which voters order their preferences. If no candidate secures a clear majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and ballots cast for that candidate are redistributed to their voters’ next-ranked option.
If every Alaskan who intends to vote for Dan Sullivan lists both Dan Sullivans as their top two choices, the mechanism should resolve any confusion. If Daniel J. fails to win a majority on the first count, those ballots would be redistributed to the voters’ second choices. The only real complication would be if Peltola were to win a majority in Round One; in that scenario, either Dan Sullivan would have been unsuccessful in any case.
Of course, Republicans have long opposed ranked-choice voting. Former Governor Sarah Palin, who challenged Peltola twice without success, has described it as “so strange” that it amounts to voter suppression.
In a Truth Social post last week, Trump labeled ranked-choice voting as “Corrupt” and argued that it “shouldn’t be allowed in our Country.”
“I just left Alaska, where we have a real bad thing,” Trump told a campaign rally in Arizona on Wednesday. “They have ranked-choice voting, where you go into some kind of test tube or something, and they pick whoever the hell they want. That’s another disgrace.”
As has often been the case, it remains unclear precisely what Trump was alluding to. And despite the objections from Republicans, ranked-choice voting has produced favorable findings: the American Bar Association notes that recent research shows it improves upon plurality voting, offering tangible benefits in representation, the quality of campaigns, voter mobilization, and turnout. It also promotes broader consensus-building and more civil campaigns, and voters report that it is easy to understand.
In a scenario where a political party unexpectedly faces, for example, two Dan Sullivans on the ballot, ranked-choice voting presents an attractive solution. The problem remains that the party itself has shown opposition to adopting the system.
