Alaska Senate Race Shaken by Same-Name Ballot Probe

Alaska's Senate contest has turned into a fight over a name on the ballot. The Alaska Senate race will be decided on Tuesday, November 3, and the final days of campaigning are now dominated by investigations into how a retired teacher named Dan J. Sullivan Jr. ended up running against the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan.

The dispute began with reporting by The New York Times, which said people connected to Democratic challenger Mary Peltola's campaign and aides to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee helped recruit the second Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher from the fishing community of Petersburg. According to the Times, interviews, text messages and documents prepared for a potential lawsuit showed the effort aimed to draw votes away from the incumbent by confusing voters faced with similar names.

Peltola, her campaign and the committee deny the account. The Petersburg retiree has also denied it, saying in June that he had no contact with Peltola's campaign. The denials have not slowed the investigations. By Thursday, the dispute involved a federal criminal probe, a state inquiry ordered by Alaska's governor, a congressional inquiry and a pending federal lawsuit over certification of the result.

The race is among a handful of Senate contests this year expected to determine which party controls the chamber, which is why the ballot-name fight has drawn attention far beyond Alaska.

Subpoenas land days before voters decide

The Justice Department has been examining the candidacy for months, and the inquiry escalated on Thursday with a round of new grand jury subpoenas, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. The subpoenas seek grand jury testimony or documents, along with records preservation demands. Neither the recipients nor the number of subpoenas was immediately clear, and more were expected, the person said.

President Donald Trump called earlier in the week for the criminal prosecution of Peltola and her campaign. On Thursday, he cast doubt on whether Peltola would be seated in the Senate even if she won, telling reporters it was hard to believe she could even be allowed to run, and later telling a rally crowd that she should be removed from the ballot and prosecuted. Attorney General Todd Blanche, in a Fox News interview on Wednesday, declined to discuss any criminal investigation but accused Democrats of "cheating," saying they were trying to take votes from the incumbent by putting up a person with the same name.

The Justice Department is also pursuing a civil lawsuit against the Alaska Division of Elections. Trump said last week that he had ordered the lawsuit, which asks a federal judge to prohibit anyone but Dan S. Sullivan from being declared the winner. On Thursday, the department filed an amended complaint that puts the Times reporting at the center of the case. Vice President JD Vance stopped short of calling for prosecution but said he supported an investigation into possible election fraud, accusing Peltola of trying to take a Senate seat from Alaska voters.

Peltola answered the claims directly on Thursday in Juneau, the state capital. She told supporters she knew nothing about any other candidate on the ballot except herself and the incumbent, and said she had no interest in "tricking voters." In a fundraising post the same day, she called the controversy a distraction and said her opponents were trying to intimidate her into backing down while avoiding questions about the cost of living.

Governor orders state inquiry as certification fight grows

Separately, Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy ordered an investigation on Wednesday, asking the state Department of Public Safety to determine whether criminal charges or civil action were warranted. The Alaska Bureau of Investigation opened the inquiry on Thursday at the governor's request, the department said, giving no further details while the investigation is active.

Dunleavy said the Times reporting revealed what he called disturbing new evidence of an organized effort to manipulate Alaska elections by recruiting candidates to deliberately confuse voters and misdirect their votes. He said deliberately misleading voters into backing a candidate they did not intend to support struck at election integrity, and added that the reporting substantially supported earlier findings by the state's elections board.

On Thursday, Dunleavy declined to commit to certifying the Senate result if Peltola wins. In an interview with NewsNation, he said his office would follow the law and act if investigators found illegal conduct, adding that such a finding could affect whether somebody is seated in the Senate. Under Alaska's process, the state's elections director certifies the result, after which the governor sends a separate certification to the Senate.

The House Oversight Committee has also entered the dispute. Its chairman, Representative James Comer of Kentucky, said he would seek interviews after Election Day with people cited as sources in the Times reporting: Elisa Rios, Peltola's former campaign manager, and Jerid Kurtz, described as an intermediary between Democratic campaign groups and the retiree.

How the namesake candidate got on the ballot

The namesake candidacy was contested long before the Times report. Earlier this year, a top state elections official ruled Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. ineligible for the primary ballot, concluding that his declaration of candidacy had been filed with a purpose to confuse or mislead voters and compromise the ballot's fairness. The case went to the Alaska Supreme Court, which ruled in June that he was qualified to run, and he has remained on the ballot since.

On the ballot itself, the men are distinguished by party and title. On the ballot, Dan S. Sullivan appears as the Republican incumbent, while Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. carries no party affiliation. The distinction has not settled the argument, with each side reading the same ballot very differently.

Among voters, the dispute is landing in mixed ways. Carter Bancroft, an independent from Juneau who voted for Peltola, said he was certain about the candidate he wanted but troubled by the latest claims, which he worried would give ammunition to Peltola's opponents. John Delgado, an independent who leans Republican, said the claims had warmed him to the incumbent senator and that Peltola should leave the race.

The Associated Press has noted that the Alaska situation is not unusual in American politics, where parties often support extra candidates on ballots to pull votes from rivals. In Ohio's Senate race, Republicans have been tied to an effort to boost a socialist candidate on the ballot who would draw votes from the Democrat challenging Senator Jon Husted. Legal experts quoted by the AP said that if state courts allow a candidacy, the federal government has no role in challenging the result.

What remains unresolved is considerable: the targets of the federal criminal investigation are unclear, the state inquiry has just begun, and the certification lawsuit is still pending. Voters go to the polls on Tuesday with those questions open. For readers following the contest, the Associated Press account of Peltola's denial and the Washington State Standard report on the investigations set out the claims and denials in full, and more politics coverage is available on genznewz.com, alongside the latest headlines on the homepage.