In August, Mary Peltola told Alaskans, "It should be a criminal offense to lie or mislead the electorate. YES!" Her campaign might have wanted to check its own text messages before she said it.

According to a New York Times investigation published Wednesday, top Peltola aides in the summer of 2025 told a staffer to find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as possible. Dan S. Sullivan is Alaska's Republican senator, and a second Dan Sullivan on the state's four-candidate general election ballot could confuse enough voters to cost him the seat. This spring, a retired teacher from Petersburg named Dan J. Sullivan filed for the Senate as a Republican. He has long supported Peltola and other Democrats.

In an Alaska Superior Court order in his ballot case, he asked to appear on the ballot as "Sullivan, Dan," exactly as the senator had already qualified. When the Division of Elections asked both men how their names should appear to avoid confusing voters, he first asked to be listed as "Dan S. Sullivan," using the senator's middle initial, before settling on "Dan J. Sullivan."

The Peltola campaign has repeatedly denied any involvement. The Times reports that the text messages tell a different story. The effort, called the "ballot composition project," involved Peltola's then-chief of staff, senior aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and a lawyer at the Elias Law Group. A Democratic operative from Ohio named Jerid Kurtz traveled the state under a fake name, pitching would-be candidates over beers, while Peltola's aides asked for updates on "our friend."

The Sullivan scheme was only one piece of it. When a progressive Democrat named David Leslie landed on the general election ballot and threatened to pull votes from Peltola, Kurtz met with him at a Fairbanks cafe, and Leslie soon dropped out. His exit opened the slot for Gerald Heikes, a Republican drywall contractor the Times reports was also recruited into the race. Peltola's aides even floated creating a MAGA party to lure conservatives onto the ballot, and the DSCC's director of campaigns texted back, "Smart." When a court kept the second Dan Sullivan on the ballot, two Peltola aides and a DSCC staffer reacted in a group chat with heart emojis.

Imagine the National Republican Senatorial Committee had hunted down a second Mary Peltola, sent an operative around Alaska under an alias and nudged a Republican off the ballot to make room for a spoiler. It would lead every newscast in America. Democrats would call it election subversion, the Elias Law Group would be in court by lunch, and "threat to democracy" would appear in every third paragraph. The Times checked a box in reporting this, but most of the rest of the national press will let it pass quietly.

Much of the press considers stopping Republicans a righteous cause — and righteous causes excuse a great deal. Only Republican dirty tricks draw the outrage. Democrats also spent millions of dollars in 2022 boosting weak candidates in Republican primaries while warning voters those very candidates would end American democracy. The press covered that as clever strategy, too.

President Donald Trump's Justice Department has now sued to block certification if the other Dan Sullivan costs the senator the race. Election law experts call the suit dubious because the Constitution leaves the administration of elections to the states and the election has not even happened yet. As a former elections lawyer, I agree that the federal lawsuit, as currently presented, is a weak case. In fact, the Justice Department is not even citing a federal statute as proof of standing, just preamble text in legislation.

The voters of Alaska should take action instead. Democrats say democracy is on the ballot, but the Democrats are the ones trying to subvert it. Peltola wanted lying to the electorate treated as a crime. The Alaska Supreme Court has already ruled that the other Dan Sullivan can stay on the ballot. Alaskans can still render their own verdict next week, knowing that the candidate who wanted to criminalize misleading voters had a staffer combing the voter rolls to do just that.

To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Andy Feliciotti at Unsplash